Ready or Not, Here Life Comes by Mel Levine

Author:Mel Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

When Not Enough Looks Familiar Enough

On the job and in school, you learn from experience, in part by getting to know all the partly concealed recurring patterns, some of which you automatically convert into rules. The rules simplify your life; we sometimes call them “rules of thumb,” handy devices for guiding your actions and making decisions that have a high probability of working out well. But what happens when a person is unaware of such patterns? She fails to operate on precedent, to learn sufficiently from experience. That might mean she keeps repeating the actions that never got her anywhere. She runs on a treadmill.

Betsy offers a vivid version of this plight. She was oblivious to the recurring patterns in her job as a stock market analyst. Her company in Chicago had assigned this very junior woman with her new MBA to cover the telecommunications industry. After only eight months she was laid off, much to her surprise and with no warning whatsoever. Her supervisor made it clear that he thought she was in the wrong field. He pointed out that all of the reports she wrote sounded the same, that they reflected an inability to see the big picture, to recognize the changing patterns that were emerging in the industry and make investment recommendations based on the patterns. For example, she could not answer questions about what startup companies in her field have in common. She couldn’t identify successful patterns of management or strategy. Betsy was out of work because she just didn’t exhibit pattern recognition.

I recall Pierre, an eleventh grader who had a long skein of struggles in all classes that featured rule-based learning. His brain suffered a dramatic meltdown whenever it was infiltrated with grammatical rules, mathematical rules, and foreign language rules. Pierre said that he had always had fun in English classes, except when they studied grammar. He pointed out that he could speak perfectly grammatical English but the rules “made no sense at all to me.” We had Pierre keep his own private rulebook, a log in which he entered rules and patterns that recurred in the subject areas that were frustrating him. All students ought to do this, at least periodically, and they need constant reminders about the quest for patterns and hidden rules. That emphasis will serve them well throughout a career.

Evaluative Thinking

In school and in careers, there is a never-ending need to evaluate ideas, people, and products (or proposed products). On the job and in the classroom, someone’s reactions are often based on such evaluations. For example, you act positively toward people who seem competent and honest: that’s an evaluation you have performed on them. An individual signs up to be part of a project because she evaluates it as one with significant potential. Both the ability and the frame of mind to be a competent evaluator vary considerably within a population of students and startup adults. Sooner or later everyone needs to become a capable critic.

A distraught mother described her twenty-one-year-old daughter to me as “one hundred percent naïve, the ultimate sucker.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.