Knowing Stuff

You know stuff. I know stuff. We all know a lot of stuff. What that stuff is and what is good and useful, is one thing; the other side of that equation is what stuff is not worth saving.

I’m not talking about junk stashed in the attic or basement, or (gasp!) the garage. Nope. I’m speaking of the stuff that makes us knowledgeable. Something learned from living life. Something we do something with to draw other conclusions, or make something.

A scrap of wood, a nail or two, and suddenly a shelf is born. Or a lamp, a tool, or piece of art.

Something tangible from simply living life. Experiences. A happening. The result noticed by the self. And then taken to another point of development later.

Doctors do this in their medical careers. It is why it is termed a ‘practice’. They learn by doing. By making deductions from available facts, they make diagnoses of illness and disease. From that they devise treatments to hopefully solve the problem. They learn from those results what works and what doesn’t. eventually they encounter many different causes of the same set of symptoms and learn how to discern differences among cases and prescribe different treatments to best ease the symptoms and conquer the disease. Practice, you see. It makes the doctor’s career a bit more perfect.

Scientists in a laboratory work a process similar to that of a doctor. Only now the ‘symptoms’ are test cases of biological matter and what chemicals or other external stimuli have an effect on the matter and its ‘symptoms’. Working successive chains of tests with small differences among them help the researcher learn more about both the matter and the disease; and what might work long-term in controlling the disease and matter issues.

Physicists do similar research tests in their labs. So too, the engineer. And all the rest of the science disciplines.

In business, career people follow their own formulas of success. Those with fresh ideas and deep commitment, try other ways to succeed in business. Those who experiment find both success and failure; but it is the succession of attempts at new methods that soon inform the courageous person what works and what doesn’t. Examining notes of both the attempts and the results should yield some information that offers predictable results. New things are found only through trying different things for different results. Doing the same thing over and over again will likely produce the same old thing.

It is the new things we want to learn. This is the ‘stuff’ referred to at the beginning of this essay. Stuff like this is worth sharing with others.

Teachers share stuff with students. In time the learning process will hopefully motivate students to recognize moments of learning on their own. Do this enough times and they become self-motivated learners. They are set for a life of discovery.

Those of us who are retired after many years of living life and earning a living, have much to share with those who have not yet learned their stuff. We can shorten the cycle of stuff sharing. Will this empower the younger people to seek more stuff and share it as well? We do not know this; we can’t even predict this. Sharing depends on other social and psychological gifts within the person. They may share freely or they may retain for their own use the stuff they learn.

In time we can only hope that they will evolve into coaches, mentors and teachers to others so those new generations can carry on to discover more and enrich more lives.

The stuff we know is sharable. In fact, its truest value is uncovered by sharing. We learn more about our stuff this way. We also help others achieve more stuff.

Stuff. It’s good. Savor it and nurture it in others.

You’ll be glad you did. So will the rest of us.

May 21, 2018