On Tacit Knowledge (again)
Posted: June 16th, 2009 | Author: vlad | Filed under: Quote, Random |THE BEST-INFORMED PERSON I EVER KNEW was a friend of my grandfather’s back in the Bronx, where I grew up. Every morning of every day of his life, this elderly man — his name, as I recall, was Boris — would dress impeccably in a suit and waistcoat and shuffle to the public library, where more than a dozen of the day’s local and out-of-town newspapers were threaded through bamboo poles and hung from racks. One by one, Boris would read them all, front to back; at dusk, he would walk home alone. This daily pilgrimage was conducted with ecclesiastic solemnity, a quiet, dignified homage to the majesty of knowledge. Even as a little boy, in that intuitive if primitive way that children comprehend important things, I understood the fundamental truth that Boris was, in some clear but compelling way, a douche bag.
Reblogging myself here, but this is the single best excerpt from a newspaper article I’ve ever read, and I catch myself thinking about this once in a while.
The number of people who are like Boris grows exponentially thanks to the internet. What’s worse, some of them actually have a lot of success and public recognition based solely on library knowledge of things — anything from "startup culture" to venture capital, to …anything, really.
As I grow older I realize that to really, really know something you need to do it. You don’t become an expert by reading about things, you become an expert by doing things.
Reading Fred Wilson does not make you a startup or VC expert. Reading Seth Godin and thinking about marketing doesn’t make you a marketing expert. And so on. If all you do is read, you’re a Boris.
Everything is much, much more complicated than it may seem from blog posts. Sorry. It’s experiences that bring the kind of tacit knowledge that make you an expert.
This is a very true point. It reminds me a little bit of the indirect analogy of life that Samuel Jackson had in the movie Fresh.
He talked about how chess players just sat around all day and were able to hone their skill, but if you put the heat on them, they would break.
I feel the same way about how people build knowledge and wisdom, but have yet to really feel the “heat” of creating something. It is that wisdom of doing something, actually facing the obstacles, the competition, the lack of time, the stress of solving a problem, the progressions of development, setbacks, interactions etc.
I totally agree with what you are saying. What also happens is now you have people who aggregate knowledge without any proof of success ( or even failure ). The internet has become one immense brawl crawl, many people on the stools, ranting about what they think they know, and what they know to never have done.
I am one of them, but I nonetheless agree.