we often hear people say “I need more time to become more professional.”, or “My goal is to become professional in this field.” and we might say the same sometimes, if not always. but the question is, how professional can be called professional.
well, it’s hard to say, I think. take IT as example, the Helpdesk can be professional if they know what they are supposed to do and they can do it well, though generally speaking, they are dealing with the first or shallow second tier of work. their work itself might not be that deep from technical perspective, but they are professional in terms of their work. then, from technical perspective, teams of level 2 or level 3 are better, but they are not really professional either, or not that professional. and even those of the top level, whether level3, or whatever name they might be called, we can only say they are professional to their work, the same as Helpdesk to theirs. and to their work itself, hmm, hard to say.
see? that’s the fact! and the fact is we can not talk about becoming professional all the time and work on and on to try to become so-called “professional”, not realizing that we might have already been professional to some work or things we want to do, and we can never reach the FINAL professional state because there is no FINAL stage. everything is changing, technology, fashion, people’s model, transportation, and so on and on. it’s a good thing that we can always keep low and know that there is much more that we are not aware of and need to learn, but a bad one that we think we can reach to the final stage in one direction and even plan to do that at the cost of anything else. that is not a wise move.
so, what should we do? well, from one perspective, we should continue to try new things and gain more knowledge to our own knowledge base, as Steve Jobs said “Stay hungry, Stay foolish”. from the other, we should also try to put what we have gained into practice, with which to do something of value, because that’s one of the most important goals we have for the life and which make the life meaningful to each of us.
that’s life. we learn something, we take out what we have learnt to do something meaningful, and then we move on with new things again. learn, take out, learn again…we can’t say, OK, I will spend the first half of my life learning, and the next half doing. no, that’s not how it works. what we are experiencing is, though we might not be comfortable with it yet.