Rookie Smarts

Rookie Smarts argues against experience and for a mindset of learning in the modern workplace, due to knowledge growing and changing fast, which gives rookies a competitive advantage, as they’re not bound by common practices and the status quo.

We all talk about how fast-paced our world has become. But most of us don’t really have an idea of exactly how fast-paced it actually is.

In the 1980’s, architect Buckminster Fuller published a book that explained how it had taken 1500 years for the knowledge from year 1 in our calendar to double. Then we doubled again in 250 years. Then 150.

The speed with which knowledge doubled became faster and faster, due to things like the printing press, radio, TV, and, most recently, of course, the internet.

Right now, the entire knowledge of humankind doubles every 12 months. Everything we’ve learned in the past 2016 years will be twice as much in 2017.

Do you see how insane that is? What’s more, with nanotechnology around the corner, companies like IBM predict that we’ll eventually end up at the ludicrous rate of 12 hours per knowledge doubling.

That also means a lot of knowledge becomes outdated fast. Right now we face an annual knowledge relevance decay rate of about 15%. That means 15% of our entire knowledge becomes useless each year.

If you work in high tech, that might go up to 30%. Therefore, if you have a high-tech job for 3 years, you’ll have to forget and re-learn everything you know.

And that’s where rookies excel. They aren’t set in their ways and have no substantial knowledge base to build upon, whereas it will be a lot harder for someone with decades of experience to let go of it and accept that they have to start over.

In some cases, rookies will even outsmart their experienced co-workers from the get-go. How? By asking a lot of questions. Imagine you’ve run an ice cream stand for 20 years. How likely would you be to let someone else tell you how to do it? The experience and confidence you’ve built up over the years has led to something called opinion stasis, where it’s hard for you to change your ways. People with opinion stasis often also pick their friends accordingly, and make sure they carry the same views and opinions, making it even harder to get fresh ideas into their head. If you’re a rookie, you’ll likely want to learn from as many experts as possible. After all, you have no clue how to do it! Liz says rookies reach out to experts 40% more than experienced workers, plus contact 6 times as many experts for feedback. Asking for help is…