I am a big fan of using analogies and metaphors when communicating. I find that it helps me better relate to others, and it helps others to better understand my ideas…
Here’s one that came up as I was talking to a colleague about industry knowledge last week.
Taking on a new topic or starting to work in a new industry can be intimidating, but it shouldn’t have to be.
Think of a new industry as a city. Just like any industry, every city is a complex collection of people, places, things, and ideas (the ultimate noun 😬).
Have you ever moved to a new city?
You probably didn’t sit down at any point and say “ok, I’m going to learn everything there is to know about this 20-block radius.”
More likely, you went through the motions of daily life and slowly gathered new knowledge and understanding about how to get around, where to buy groceries, and which place in the neighborhood has the best coffee…
With time, you built a high-level, mental map of the city with deep, specified knowledge of the areas you spend the most time in or around.
Everybody’s experience of the city is different, and everybody has a unique perspective on what the city is.
So, you will never truly know every aspect of a city. But also, do you really care?
You will never know everything about an industry either. Over time, you will gain a good general sense of where things are and how they connect.
There will always be new topics and areas to explore, but once you understand how they connect to the bigger picture everything will be much easier.
5 years ago, I moved from the US to Tel Aviv and started to work in a tech company serving developers and DevOps engineers.
Looking back, my experience in getting familiar with the observability space was something like this:
(1) go deep on different topics – aka write blog posts (2) piece together how the topics relate to each other (3) go deeper (4) expand to new topics (5) relate back (6) rinse and repeat.
At some point that mental map started to form. It took time though. And, to be honest, some days that map feels like it might as well be the map of Mordor or whatever (pretty and all, but a total fantasy).
There are many (MANY) times that I begin to work on a project and find myself “wandering around a strange neighborhood.”
In the last 5 years, the amount of research that I do hasn’t gone down, it’s only become more streamlined and focused.
Instead of focusing my energy on “knowing everything,” I tend to go through the motions of everyday life and do my best to turn every experience and every project into an opportunity to deepen my knowledge in this particular “neighborhood” of the industry.