There is a mid-life career habit that has followed me home.
I nod half a second after every sentence begins. I’ve been there. I know exactly where you’re going with this.”
The nod says: “I know.
There will be that split-second in which I decide whether to nod, or ask the question instead. I hope I can go back to being the man who asks the question. (Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on [email protected]. The views expressed are personal)
Because somewhere this week, in a meeting or gathering, a term I’ve never heard before will be spoken.
This was borne home to me, when my elder daughter and I were discussing her career options recently. She is studying what I studied. I like to think I’ve kept abreast of developments in this field. I read about it constantly. So, when she described a direction she was drawn to, I responded with the nod. And proceeded to produce answers to questions I did not actually know the answers to. It felt like fatherhood and experience. It turned out I was simply wrong. When I was in college, we had chapters on parasitology; she has studied entire papers on the subject. The syllabus in my head was one from the past; the field has since moved on. The world she eventually described was not the one I imagined it to be. When I admitted this, she seemed relieved. We are now navigating this together, working out the best questions to explore. Ironically, this is not who I was trained to be. For most of my working life, I made a living out of not yet understanding. They expect us to think, interrogate, and ask the right questions. I have a feeling that seniority at work is at risk of eroding this core skill, if I let it. For example, a few weeks ago, in a room where people were discussing self-healing networks, I stopped them to ask exactly how these work. The answer became an education in how contemporary telecom networks are being built. It would have been easier to nod and look it up later. But I know from experience that nothing beats learning about something new from an expert. I feel like don’t do that often enough, these days.
Because nobody expects us to have the answers, nobody thinks less of us for it,. Because i’ve been writing on technology and business for so long, and because I am viewed as an insider, I hesitate to be the one asking questions, perhaps.
A good reporter typically walks into a room where everyone knows more than he does, and says, in some form, “Sorry, can you explain that?
My daughters say they find it infuriating. I have so far argued that age and experience have granted me discernment. I do know what they’re going to say next! I am ready to acknowledge that this simply isn’t true. Would that be a diminishment? Those aren’t the only choices, of course. The third option is to embrace a greater degree of humility. This would involve admitting that, in the spheres of business and technology, the people who understand the newest evolutions best are often the youngest among us. They have skills we didn’t grow up with, and can use new tools in ways they weren’t even designed for. That used to be me. I’d like to think that can be me still, in a different avatar. Someone who has learnt, and earned a position of seniority, but understands that not asking the questions extracts too high a cost, over time. I hope I can hold on to that thought.
Is this a “status problem” of sorts: As a “senior”, how will you look in public if you ask certain questions?
