The value of learning something new
When I was in community college I took a class called Music Appreciation. It was an online-only class in the days (~2004) when the online experience was pretty rudimentary. I thought it would be super easy and I was wrong. I was unengaged, barely got a passing grade, and still struggle to tell an oboe from a clarinet.
Fast forward to March 2020. I ordered a keyboard to my East Village apartment and began to poke at the keys. I learned how to play the G-E, G-E sequence a baseball organist plays to prompt “LET’S-GO DOD-GERS!” I got uncommonly giddy when I learned to play a few measures of the intro to “Let It Be.”
I haven’t progressed much in terms of playing. But in terms of appreciation, I’m basically peaking on psychedelics every time I hear someone play piano.
I recently offered a haute take on Twitter that coming to the client side I’ve come to appreciate a lot that I was unaware of before. And also that I’ve noticed a trend that’s not exclusive of many organizations — false uniqueness.
False uniqueness (a term I first came across at the same community college at which I failed to grasp basic music appreciation) is a bias toward believing that one’s own knowledge was harder to come by than other bodies of knowledge. In behavioral economics it’s a cousin to the endowment effect, that what you have is more valuable because you’re the one who has it.
I’ve encountered this in automotive, telecom, beauty, and a bit in toys. Our business is different. It’s complicated. It takes time to learn it.
It’s not usually a welcoming message but fortunately I’m very stubborn and just dumb enough to believe I can learn anything, despite examples like the above.
This is where being a newcomer AND eager to learn new things is a huge advantage.
Like how every city takes time to understand, every business takes time to learn. And similarly, you learn better and faster when you stay open and come in equipped with right questions.
Learning fashion was no less nuanced than learning tax prep. Automotive and toys each require deeply understanding how things like industry product history and distribution affect how we do marketing comms. In digging in, we find the good stuff.
Reaching some depth of knowledge in a handful of businesses and breadth of understanding across dozens is like my piano playing: I know enough that my appreciation for the experts is high and I want to up my game.
