57. A Personal Story About Studying

For over a year, I have wanted to study project management. I wanted to get the CAPM qualification from PMI to boost my employability. I knew I would be tested on the definition of a project. According to the PMBOK 7, a project is “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.” This idea needed to be copied into my mind, but how should it be done?

Memorization vs. Understanding

I could memorize it by repeating it out loud and testing myself until the exact words were engraved in my mind. There is a problem with this approach: the idea is being copied without the use of critical thinking. I am just accepting this idea as true because of the authority of PMI and because I want to pass an exam for a qualification. I couldn’t do this.

Questioning Accepted Ideas

I often start with the assumption that certain ideas might be wrong, which leads me to question them more deeply. Of course, all ideas have errors due to fallibility, but I am unsure what the selection criteria are in my mind to assume an idea is wrong. In this case, though, I found Patrick Collison's question, "Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?" This made me think there was something important missing from our understanding of projects and I needed to start from the ground up. So instead of using the PMI definition, I spent several days forming my own definition of a project.

The Struggle with Conventional Studying

I struggled to convince myself that it is okay to replicate an idea in my head without evaluating it when studying. I need to delve deeply into an idea, which takes time—something not conducive to university exams and tests. I spend so much time on a few ideas or forcing myself to copy ideas without fully understanding them. This results in the majority of the ideas missing from my mind. Even now, although I finished university several years ago, placing a deadline on studying to achieve some goal demotivates me. I didn’t know why until this morning when I was thinking about The Evolution Of Culture.

Reflections on Qualifications

Gaining a degree or certificate means you have, by some measurement, faithfully replicated the generally accepted ideas of the subject. The institutions do not care about how those ideas are replicated or about the errors in those ideas. Companies also subscribe to this convention, which is why qualifications are important for jobs. The exception to this is startups. They have to reject convention to stand a chance of achieving their goals. I, too, will continue to reject convention. I will not get any qualification that cares more about the ideas themselves than how the ideas are replicated and the errors with those ideas. I will pursue my way of learning because I value how ideas are understood and applied, rather than just accepting them without question.