Considering it has been a while since my last blog post, a long while, I won't assume that you have read it, so here. In my previous blog post I discussed how I face any unprecedented issue, or a surprise paradigm shift, or a certain change in any field i am working in at the time, In this post I will add to what I had said before. It is no surprise to anyone that whenever you wish to embark on any new field or take on any new hobby or even learning something as simple as driving you need to learn the basics first. To justify this, would be redundant but to clarify why you NEED to is not.
Let's start off with something simple, like driving a manual transmission car. Clearly you do not require a PHD in mechanical engineering to be able to drive a car, but you do know that each gear has a limit, and once it hits that limit you need to change gears. Consider now you have learned to drive an automatic car, and then you HAD to drive a stick-shift car, would you be able to understand this ? Now that the simple example is out of the way, let's move on to a more elaborate one.
Consider you need to adapt your marketing plan to social media. Let's say you work in the marketing department of company X, and company X has finally decided to strengthen, or even initiate it's presence on social media. But, you do not understand the fundamentals of marketing, you have learned what works when you started your career and didn't bother to dig deeper and understand the reasons why some campaigns work in some ways and others don't. You have not understood that some brands can use certain techniques other brands cannot. You have not understood the engine behind the marketing strategies that YOU have put to action in the past. Do you expect you will be able to transform company X's marketing strategy from a uni-directional one to a bi-directional one ? ( which is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to social media ). NO. You need to dig deeper in your domain, you need to seek out the basics. The BASICS are GOLD. If you only understand the end result or the conclusion of years of thought then you have wasted all the thoughts that were spared over the years, as simple as that. Dig deeper, Learn the basics, THEN you can adapt to any change as easily as possible ( using FLAA of course :P ). Now let's get a bit more technical shall we ?
Consider you are a web-developer. You know 1 programming language and you think you got it all figured out. Then this monster project comes along, which you would LOVE to work on, alas, your beloved programming language won't be able to handle the required. Or even worse, it can, but poorly so and you are so afraid that you do not dare try a different one that does it much better because you aren't able to learn it. Why? because you learned web-development without learning the basics of software development, without learning the old languages that are " so old who uses them anymore" well, true, no one uses them but they hold BASICS that you now see hidden in the frameworks you use and do not understand them at all. So how do you expect to understand another language, that is designed differently but in the end does the same ( like all languages ) ? You won't be able to learn it fast enough because you do not understand language design, because you have not learned the basics, because you, with your concentration on the "New Generation" languages have become, ironically, obsolete.
In conclusion, we need the "dinosaurs" of our domains and of our fields they hold the raw gold and we have a star-shaped gold that if we chose to change into a circle-shaped one we are screwed. We need the raw gold.
Have a nice weekend.
