How to develop a 'perpetual rookie' mindset
I have never been very fond of rookies – upstart behavior
and ignorance puts me off. But the tag line ‘Why Learning Beats Knowing’
attracted me to the book. Being in the knowledge industry that is something
that resonated with me.
Reading the book was a good decision – Liz Wiseman shows how
an unencumbered mind can gather expertise quickly, and with no baggage to weigh
them down how a rookie can perform well in the new world of uncertainty.
Further she shows how all of us can keep a rookie mindset even as we grow
older.
However a couple of areas are not addressed adequately – (a)
you have to be pretty smart in the first place (b) the stories are based on the
western culture where an open educational system encourages questioning; I am
not sure if rookies will fare so well in the eastern world – where ‘experience’
and ‘rote learning’ are given more weightage than independent thinking.
