On Why You should have a Library…

I recently happened to attend a training program conducted by Dale Carnegie Training Institute.

The Skill cycle

The trainer talked about a Skill cycle that says Practice is what transforms knowledge into a skill...Very valid point. Follow this link to access the Presentation I am referring to.



I thought for a while and a question popped up in my mind…

Is it really possible to practice and experience everything that is needed for mastering a skill, to transform knowledge into a Skill…

I don’t think so. Nope Not possible.

The reason being ;We do not have the time, the privilege, the resources, the risk appetite to practice ourselves everything, experience everything. Give it a thought and I am sure you folks would agree with me.

The Example

To emphasis more on this point, consider a software engineer working on say Linux(For the people who are not from IT, Linux is a open Source Operating system like Windows) development and aspires to be a Leading Linux developer. To sharpen his development skills, he works on various projects.

But is it possible for him to develop everything he needs for his projects on his own? Just impossible.

For sure,

1. He will have to use tools created by others,

2. He will have to refer to the experience of others available on various online forums to see how to fix a bug,

3. He will have to refer to best practices posted by experts to architect his project,

4. He will have to use the software libraries created by others

The Summary

The gist is that we have to look for external resources to gain experience at times to achieve the level of expertise needed to carry on with a skill. We have to tap the learning's from others experiences, from others expertise to ensure

• We do not repeat the mistakes of others
• To fasten the entire process of completing projects

In short, we do not want to reinvent the wheel all the times. ( Please read again "All the times", as at times its needed to Reinvent the wheel, Will talk about it in some other post)

The Other Side of the Ball

I was discussing this thought with a friend of mine and he gave a very crisp example to support the concept. He said, if you hold a ball in your hand, at any point of time you could only see the front side of the ball i.e the side in front of you, the other side is always hidden. So if you want to have a look at the hidden side also, you have to use external resources.

So what are the various external resources? I would say, everything around us is eager to teach us something provided we are keen to take-in the lessons.

In one of my earlier posts, I have talked about learning from half baked burnt stories i.e learning from others experience and thus saving ourselves from the mistakes others committed.

Other than learning from others experience,  one of the best ways of doing this is Reading. Yes Reading books. To concretize the point I am trying I make, I Googled and following are the quotes Google came up for my search “quotes on Reading”

A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.” - Abraham Lincoln

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.” - Abraham Lincoln

I got these fantastic quotes about Reading from this site...

Some people right off quotes as we all are obsessed with facts and so I Googled (Again, in fact I do it through the day) to get this article published in one of the medical journals based on a research to support my notion of how reading helps...

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/223212.php

I hope you have learnt something reading this post….Why don’t you share your thoughts using the comments section so that the learning multiplies...