Paul P. spoke at Zagaku today. His talk was unique because rather than giving a technical talk he shared his thoughts regarding apprenticeships in general and answered some questions that the apprentices had regarding the 8th Light apprenticeship.
He described the apprenticeship as consisting of largely two phases. The first is more academic and focuses mainly on learning and applying foundational knowledge. He described this first phase using a graph like below (excuse my paint skills).
During this phase you’re alternating between skill acquisition (the steep upswings on the graph) and practice. The practice phase isn’t intended to necessarily improve your abilities, but it’s necessary to internalize what you’ve just learned. This phase emphasizes learning fast and being able to pivot from one thing to the next quickly.
The second phase is intended to be more practical. During this phase, Paul suggested that we start looking for places that we could help our mentors or 8th Light. He recommended that we really try to understand what our mentors do and the day-to-day problems that they are dealing with. If possible try to lighten their load even if it's in a minor way.
He also had some very general guidance for the apprenticeship, which I’ve tried to summarize below:
- Try to balance your own need to move forward and deliver on time against the somewhat conflicting goal of maintaining very high autonomy. However, if you’re ever in doubt about what to do maintain a bias towards action. In other words, if you're stuck and not moving forward at all don't spend days in this state without talking to anyone. He also emphasized that having a bias towards action is something that will serve you very well as a consultant. Once you're being paid hourly by a client, you need to be producing something and if a problem is stopping this from happening then you need to solve that problem as fast as you possibly can.
- If you’re unsure about what expectations are then explicitly ask. Again this is something that maps directly to client work.
- Be proactive about what you need. It may have been a while since your mentors were in your shoes, so something that they find straightforward might not be so straightforward to you. Make sure you're speaking up, and getting getting clarification if something is not clear.