Touching the Ground
One of the interesting things I've noticed from effective friends and coworkers is that they tend to form unusually clear understanding of things they work on.
This is not to stay that most people don't have a sufficiently clear understanding of things they work on, but it seems... different with people who are very effective. Most people (including me) tend to operate on a lot of fuzzy knowledge – where the mental models are often vague because we haven't bothered to truly connect them to something we understand. To me, it seems that very effective people make those connections.
As an example, in my day-to-day work I am often adjacent to a certain technology called COM. However, my understanding of COM is still quite weak, and I think this is the case for the vast majority of junior developers. Most senior developers seem to have a good understanding of COM, however, I don't think that is because they've been around COM longer and incidentally picked up on it – I think they are at the senior level partially because they have a solid understanding of related technologies. And I don't necessarily think that they took much more time and energy to try to understand these technologies, though they easily could have done that too. I think a lot of it comes down to good habits when incorporating new knowledge, such that new knowledge are connected to very close to something that they truly understand.
What does it mean to truly understand something? At least for me, in the areas of concrete knowledge, it means to be able to understand and explain how something works (and ideally why it works this way) down to a fundamental level. Everyone has at least some sort of ground level knowledge, kind of like “2 + 2 = 4”, but how much of their understand of the world are connected to that ground level is dependent on the person.
What trips me up very often is that no fire alarms go off in my head when I get new knowledge that's not grounded. Perhaps this was evolutionarily good – it wouldn't do much for primate humans to obsess over random phenomena when survival itself was challenging. In practice though, I don't really like how I can't explain how a lightbulb works, or that sometimes I read a book thinking that I understood it only to have the knowledge be pretty useless when I try to apply them.
The type of confusion/fog when I don't really understand something, and the type of satisfaction I feel when I really understand something, are feelings that I'm trying to get better at recognizing now. I think there will be a decent amount of upfront trouble to implement something like this, but it's better than the frustration that almost always come from the lack of understanding. Besides, it's just nice to be on solid ground, or know that the bridges you walk on have strong foundations.
Related reading: understanding – nabeelqu
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Categories: #thinking, #psychology