Effort & Reward
“Just watch YouTube …”
These were my son’s helpful words when I was trying to find a solution to a tech challenge. He went on to add, “why bother reading everything on this if someone else has already read it all and can show you how?!”
It rhymes with another recent conversation with him about effort and reward.
It’s a topic on which I could segue to many different ones, particularly zooming in on the generational differences that might be at play here.
It has, however, got me thinking about curiosity and learning. Curious people - like me - who love to learn new knowledge and skills might default to the deep dive to read and understand all that we can know in order to solve the problem at hand. It is not the most productive approach yet for me it’s a win-win way to get to the solution and experience the fun of learning. The topic doesn’t matter; the learning does.
His is the minimum viable approach. Discover just enough to solve the problem, move quickly on to doing the fun things and reserving the deep dive motivation and energy for topics of interest.
This is an example of different preferences and thinking styles between my son and I, and are the sorts of differences we see every day in our workplaces.
There’s no right or wrong. Just different. Each approach has upsides and downsides.
We each can learn something from the other’s approach. And, following our conversation, we probably have.
Perhaps in our workplaces aiming our curiosity and learning toward each other might just be the win-win we need.