Reflections on Rookie Smarts by Liz Wiseman

Rookie Smarts - Why learning beats knowing

I was recently looking through the various mixes on Office Mix website when this presentation by Liz Wiseman captured my attention.

The speech was an eye opener to me especially that it correctly reflected an inner feeling that was burning me recently.

Challenges make us grow

During my career, I still remember some unforgettable days where I really felt that I gained a lot of experience or knoweledge. That feeling was exhilerating. It's interesting that this only happened when dealing with challenges that I am trying to overcome for the first time.

It's during such situations that my mind function at full power!

After watching Liz wiseman's speech, I realized that we give our best when we open our mind to every possibility without any prior knowledge hindering our sight.

The myth of expertise

Sometimes we tend to believe that career is built with cumulative experience in one specific subject area and that we reach the apex when we become a "subject matter expert".

While this can sometimes be true, we generally reach a point where we are not learning anything new, repeating ourselves day after day.

This is not fun at all as we are missing lot of new knowledge and experience with challenges we never faced before.

A forever rookie seeking new knowledge and challenges is going to become the future of career success especially that the pace of change is getting faster and a huge transformation of work landscape is being performed.

Missing answers from Liz's speech

I enjoyed the talk a lot, yet it left me with unanswered questions.

I don't have a problem changing my career or accepting new challenges, but generally managers don't give their trust to a rookie to do the job of a senior.

For you Liz, as much as the story about building Oracle's university is inspiring, it was just a lucky opportunity that doesn't happen to everybody.

Is there a strategy that we can adopt to prove to our managers or future employers that we can solve his problem using our rookie strategy? Will we get paid as a senior or as a rookie?