Monday Motivation with Drake

 

I stopped asking myself and started feeling myself …Drake – Survival

This line, from Drake’s Friday, launched album was probably all bravado when it was written, but on hearing it a thought struck me. Most of us are trained by society to try to find all the answers before we can solve our problems. In school, we’re encouraged to read the entire material before we sit for an exam.

In public settings saying the words “I don’t know” is considered taboo. To have a career, we are forced to layer our CVs with dozens of certifications, none of which guarantee success or expertise.

But experience has shown me that any answers we get are those we create and the only way to create answers is by venturing out, feeling our way around things, experimenting and building our intuition.

I’m currently rounding up my degree in geophysics. The nature of the course requires that we go on field trips. On every trip I’ve attended, I’ve seen how being immersed in a field rather than learning about it in a classroom enriches perspective, how experiencing real field situations fills the gaps left by theory, reinforces understanding and creates concrete, real-life applications from an abstract idea you had to read textbooks to understand.

This is not to decry academic learning, but these days there appears to be a preference for passive reading over active learning.

Drake probably didn’t intend to teach a life lesson… or maybe he did who knows; the point, however, is that to experience growth in your career, you have to go beyond asking questions. You have to take action, to experience. Questions won’t answer themselves, you have to test and see if they’re correct.

I had a lecturer who used to say “there is no right or wrong answer, only experience. Whether you get it wrong or right, you will have learned.”

The same applies here, are you willing to go after what you want? Or will you wait till you have the answers?