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How Do You Tell a Renaissance Man from a Bum These Days?

By on February 9, 2012 in Self-Learning

Feeling locked into a career choice?
 Photo courtesy of Jhayne Holmes

I’m not a great fan of chit-chat at the best of times, but one of the questions I really hate answering is “so, what do you do?” Most people think it’s a simple question, but for me the answer is pretty complicated. I do a range of things, and the range varies from year to year, or sometimes even month to month. A lot of people find this difficult to understand, and often assume that “I dabble in various pursuits” is a euphemism either for mafia involvement or chronic unemployment.

When I came up through the education system, a jack-of-all-trades was definitely seen as a master of none.  The only accepted “right” way to go about choosing a career was to pick something and stick with it, to go as far as you could in one field while ignoring everything else.  If you had several interests you wanted to pursue and weren’t willing to give up any of them, you weren’t seen as ambitious – you were seen as flaky, wishy-washy, and unable to commit. The question of “what do you do?” was supposed to have a one-word answer, end of story.

Fast-forward to the present day: this attitude is slowly changing. It’s becoming more common for people to cast nets in several directions, and then use the knowledge they gain through experience to move on and explore other avenues of interest. Even ten years ago, confusion was pretty much the universal response when I said, “I’m working on several things right now.” These days, I’m encountering more and more people nodding and saying, “yeah, me too.”

What’s more, companies are starting to perceive the Renaissance employee as being flexible and diverse rather than wishy-washy, and there’s much less stigma surrounding a desire to do many things. That desire, after all, does not necessarily indicate a tendency toward laziness; many energetic and accomplished people find it difficult to settle on one particular area of work.

Does that mean that by doing lots of things, you’ll never be a real expert in anything? Not necessarily. If we use Dr. K. Anders Ericsson’s “10,000-hour rule” as a general guideline, given a 40-hour week, it takes approximately five years of study and applied effort to become an expert in any particular field. Obviously this measurement can vary depending on your natural proclivities, but even if we use a conservative estimate of being able to master three professions in a twenty-year period, that’s still two more than most people take on in a lifetime.

If you’re less concerned with being at the absolute top of your field in everything you do, and more concerned with simply enjoying a wide range of experiences, you can do even more. You don’t have to be the number one world leader at something to make decent money or be respected for your ability level.

If you only have one passion in life, great, go for it.  If you have several, that’s also great – there’s no reason you can’t go for all of them, and it may even help you out in the job market when a potential employer sees that you are bringing more than one set of skills to the table.

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How Cheating Has Opened the Door for Real Learning

By on January 25, 2012 in Self-Learning

Classroom Cheater
Image courtesy of Jared Stein

Traditional classroom learning is losing a significant amount of its practical value. How do I know this? I already had a hunch it was true based on my observation that friends with work experience were getting decent jobs more readily than friends with advanced degrees. However, something that happened recently drove the point home from another perspective.

I was offered a freelance writing gig through a friend of a friend, and after some inquiry, discovered it was a position with an “academic writing” service. Translation: students who have to work multiple jobs to pay for their university education do not have time to do things like actually acquiring the education, so they pay academic writing services to do some or even most of the work for them. Shocking.

Also eye-opening: it’s not very difficult to find people who, for a fee, will disguise themselves to look enough like you and take an exam on your behalf. If the exam time conflicts with your schedule or you just don’t feel confident enough to take it, simply hire a stand-in. Many university classes are large enough that no one would notice.

Against university policies? Almost certainly. Unethical? Without a doubt. And employers aren’t stupid – what exactly is the value of a degree if there’s no way to determine whether or not the person holding the degree actually earned it?

As technology and the internet provide increasingly refined ways to cheat, I think we’ll definitely be seeing even more of a shift toward companies placing less emphasis on degrees, and more on the demonstration of skills and experience. Luckily, the internet also provides resources for those interested in learning these skills on their own. As a bonus, with self-learning, you also develop valuable meta knowledge (i.e. learning how to be your own teacher in the most effective way), which in itself is extremely useful.

While I still think there’s plenty of intrinsic value in a traditional education (after all, I’m currently looking into graduate programs myself), I think from a practical standpoint we need to start reassessing that value in a more modern way. Teachers and guides are useful, of course, and even necessary in many areas, but the focus now needs to be on education for its own sake, not on the degree certificate as the end-all-be-all.

After all, in a world where you can basically purchase a degree, the person who can actually demonstrate knowledge, regardless of how they acquired it, will be king.

What could you start learning today, on your own, that would enrich your life or job prospects down the road?

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