Remember the Matrix? The movie by Wachowski brothers that shook the world in 1999. There was a concept of accelerated training, when knowledge was simply uploaded to your brain. In a matter of seconds you could learn Kung-Fu or how to control the helicopter. Now, what was the most attractive in that concept?
The fact, that you wouldn’t have to fight with yourself day after day, until you would eventually give up and abandon the training, burying the dreams about the black belt or the license.
Imagine, if tribe leaders would just gather and sign the peace treaty, without starting the war. That’s what it is, the real training – a war of your future against your past. A civil war inside of you. When one part of your brain screams that it is much safer to sit in the trench or retreat, while other objects, that if you don’t follow your dream now, it will turn into the nightmare later.
Once I’ve said, that one of the most important value of any human being is the ability to predict the outcome of own actions. In the mentioned movie, the Matrix, when protagonists were about to escape using the abandoned helicopter at the roof of the skyscraper, one of them used the instantaneous training to get the required skill. She was able to predict, that if she would be able to drive that thing off the roof, they would stay alive, which was exactly her goal for the moment.
Now, back to reality, do you still consider that access to the knowledge is open only to the chosen ones?
When the system administrator of an IT company gets an offer to spend one month to train himself for the new version of his operating system, what do you think would be his answer?
What would be an answer of any IT worker, offered a huge list of training courses which they would have to take during their free time, at no charge, from anywhere, online?
The answer would be – looks great, but I’m so busy now with work, studies, family, alien invasion, that perhaps I’ll take it at another time.
That’s the short version. The real, untold edition of the answer, sounds like that – “I know, that if I will take the training, I will know more, and my effectiveness will rise, but then I will get attention from my boss, and perhaps that would mean additional responsibility, which always means an additional risk of failure, as I will have to do something, that I never did before. And I will fail, and they will laugh at me. I would prefer to keep my mediocrity, as it is safe and stable”.
Believe it or not, but money is not a major issue when we are talking about training. Neither is time. The real issue is anxiety. The subtle fear to change the life and eventually to become someone, to fulfill the dream.
I made an experiment. I offered free training, online, for any of about 300 training courses, to approximately 100 of working IT specialists. With free official exam afterwards – Microsoft, Cisco, VMware – you name it. They all responded in the same fashion. 100% of them. Sure, but now I have no time for training, but I would really love to.
In one’s dreams, he has a house, cars, motorcycles and a happy family. It’s the dream world, where he is free, and it looks so perfect that he doesn’t believe he could get there. He thinks that everyone who got there, took the shortcut, and there is no shortcut left for him. The coward part of his psyche chooses to have a beer with friends at the bar, instead of training session at home. Because, you know, then nobody would laugh at you trying to change the world.