Back in high school, I had a friend who was deeply interested in the martial arts. He told a story of a martial-arts student — I’ll say a karate student — who had started out as a “White Belt” and earned different-colored belts as his skills progressed — yellow, orange, green and so on — until he was finally awarded the coveted Black Belt. When he received his Black Belt, the student said, “Now I truly know karate!”
His teacher said, “No, the Black Belt means you are finally ready to begin learning karate.”
I’ve remembered that story for decades, now, but I never really understood it until I was learning to program computers. I’m a “self-taught” programmer; I never took classes, but I read books, studied programs printed in magazines, and talked to a more knowledgeable friend when I got stuck. I started with the BASIC programming language, but eventually I learned assembly language, which is much closer to the native ones and zeros that are the computer’s true native language.
With assembly language, I could create routines that worked ten, a hundred, or even a thousand times faster than similar code written in BASIC. That’s a good way to impress a BASIC programmer.
If you don’t know how to do it, assembly language programming is a dark and mysterious art, and the people who can do it look like wizards. When I set out to learn it, I thought it would make a pretty lofty capstone to my education in programming. But when I’d learned it, and used it for a while, I realized assembly language wasn’t a destination; it was a starting point. Everything I’d learned formed only a foundation on which to build a real education. Assembly language was a Black Belt; it meant “Now you are ready to begin.”
I’ll bet it’s the same way in many other fields, as well: the apparent goal is only the starting point. I’d guess that, even if you attain the top rank beyond Black Belt in karate, you look at what you’ve learned and say, “Oh, now I see how to begin.”
It doesn’t end.
Spink Nogales | 29-Sep-09 at 9:34 pm | Permalink
Eventually the baker must cut the cake, and the bricklayer must cast a stone.
als ich ein Kind war, some german guy said if you stare at the void for too long, then you risk becoming that which you have been staring at.
Michael Burton | 30-Sep-09 at 12:36 pm | Permalink
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone, is what I say.
You’re right, though — at some point, we actually have to do the thing we’ve been learning to do. But if you’re any good, your education doesn’t end when your actual practice begins. After he’s worked on a few buildings, a good bricklayer should know things about bricklaying that nobody ever taught him. At some point, he should have enough confidence in his training and his own experience to try out innovations, and enough humility to know when a promising new idea isn’t working.
I don’t know what proportion of bricklayers are really passionate about bricklaying, but a really devoted bricklayer at the end of a long career should think, “You know, I was really starting to get the hang of this.”
I think we’ve got a mindset that there’s a point where we stop learning and start doing, but the world isn’t that simple. You can’t learn all there is to know about any subject worth thinking about. We should always proceed with a certain humility about the limits of our knowledge, and a mind open to learning more.