The Many Metaphors of the Learning Curve

Often it feels like the faster I peddle the less I go anywhere. The web has opened up a plethora of possiblities and opportunites, but it is also opening them up at an exponential rate that unless you're the Lance Armstrong of learning curves, it's either switch to granny gears and try and keep up or turn around and bail out, but one must keep up with the Joneses and the Joneses I know are always the ones way up front on the cutting edge of that damned sickel.

It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and though I am old in chronological years, I am as frisky as a Jack Russel. One who has 29 years of post-matric work experience behind her is undoubtedly old. I get shouted at rather regularly when I state this fact, as if I was admitting to stupidity. It's odd really. But I do sometimes tackle the learning curve like a puppy dog with a shoelace, which, to another human being, can seem something like an exercise in stupidity.

At other times, my ever present companion sits next to me like a shadow that forever stretches into the distance. Sometimes it's fat and short and shaped rather unattractively. Squatting out in front of me and reminding me of how much work I have to do to achieve my goals. Other times it's long and thin and runs along side me and laughs with me. I have learnt to embrace it, yet oh yes, I am still learning to make real peace with it.

My formative years have been, to say the least, unusual. Unusual in a way that a middle class White South African would call unusual. I am not White, I am neither Black nor Coloured, nor any other colour one may choose to use for a person's race. As a Chinese South African pre-94 I had a little more opportunities for education than a Black person, but for reasons only my parents themselves know, schooling was second fiddle to working in the family business. So I studied little, and scraped and squeezed through matric kicking and screaming. If you ever ask me and I tell you I have no regrets. Don't believe a word. I won't believe you. I regret,
wholeheartedly and unashamedly, not paying attention at school. Enough said. And so the stage was set for my entire working career to come. Needless to say, the lack of meaningful education and alphabets to the end of my name always subconciously, (and often consciously) hindered me, made me feel inferior, and created a mountain that should have stayed a molehill. Forever and a day that mountain is a part of the learning curve that I am constantly climbing.

So here I sit with 29 years of work experience, an infallible track record for attendance, and a folder full of (whoopie) certificates that are worth less than the space they take up in my study. What should I do with a NPC3 qualification in photolithography, numerous certificates in various print and web software applications, and certificates for this and that design course or another from a previous life when all I do when I'm not working is learning about "the next big thing", because I have come to the revelation that actually, that current next big thing - social media - is what I have been passionate about since the inception of the internet. Everyone is going on about Web 2.0 as if it's a new concept. It is and it isn't. UseNet groups in the history of the internet were made up of individuals who developed a communication style that didn't come from grammar books and English professors with marketing or journalism degrees. And then later came the Chat rooms like Firefly which got me running up the agency stairs to boot up the Mac. The internet has come full circle and grown up.

I am proud to say I've grown up with it. I know how web users think, and I know how they like it. I will even have the audacity to say I was one of the first. This would somehow make me qualified to a certain degree to write copy for the web, to manage content in various social media sites and to do it predominantly well. And I do. And I have. But it's not enough. Not enough to answer an ad that glibly asks for 3 years experience, plus degree/diploma in journalism/copywriting/marketing, plus samples of, etc. And so I sit on the inside of this learning curve that looks like a tunnel, and I peddle. I pedal because it's the only thing I know, and hope that I can pedal faster than that damned curve.