Every year millions of young people finish school full of confidence and self-importance and arrive in the workplace only to find out how much they don’t know.
Don’t overlook the great importance of the practical knowledge you have and the importance of the practical knowledge you can gain by learning every aspect about the things you do.
Patty Griffin spent years on the coffeehouse circuit, looking for any chance to play her music for an audience. The New England native was thrilled when she finally got her big break, a contract with a&m records.
She found a veteran producer and plunged headfirst into the studio to record. After an exhausting two months of studio work, she had an album to play for the record company.
They immediately rejected it.
Patty realized that it wasn’t a rejection of her so much as much as a rejection of the process that she had followed, one where her input was ignored. “My voice got lost in the production. It became the producer’s record, not mine. It was very far from the direction I wanted to go.”
She wondered what would happen if she sent the record company copies of her songs recorded in practice sessions, songs recorded without a producer or a professional band. “I knew better what I could do—how to bring my voice, figuratively and literally, into a record.”
Despite the fact that some of the songs were performed while Patty was sitting at a kitchen table, the record company loved them as she had originally created them.
With her songs as she wanted them intact on the album, Patty took a lesson about making her music and not “worrying about what everybody else would do.”
Knowledge gained through workplace experience was six times more important than grades earned in school in predicting job performance of new employees.
Sternberg, Forsythe, Hedlund, Horvath, Wagner,
Williams, Snook, and Grigorenko 2000