Wisdom aberrations

One of the ways we gain knowledge is by reading and listening, but many of the useful things we learn require quite a lot of those. We need to understand the context around the thing we’re learning, understand the attempts or failures that eventually led to the learning, among other things. People write whole books to teach these things, but humans really don’t seem to like reading entire books, they want faster payoffs.

And so people start summarizing material, coming up with short “main takeaways”. Then this starts to be passed as wisdom. However, as this happens, that important context is lost. When context is lost, the wisdom doesn’t “work” all the time. It was only valid around that context.

I see this a lot with VCs and startup people repeating the same mantras over and over: ship fast, focus on the customer, talk to customers, learn about the problem instead of a solution…

Reading some popular old books on management and company stuff, I noticed some of these things being said by those books, but there was a whole lot of context around it that was important. And people repeating these things may be harmful to their product and/or work.