Choose your fighter.
Every community has that guy or gal who seems to know everything. They’re either a fountain of random (and often seemingly useless) academic knowledge, or it’s more a “street smarts”/local knowledge kind of thing. Either way, when you’ve got a question, you go to them.
We know they don’t literally know everything. The guy who can fix everything in your car or around your house probably can’t answer the same questions your random-useless-trivia friend can.
But there was once a time when a dedicated soul could master virtually all the available knowledge in the world.
And it wasn’t that long ago.
Who was the “last man“?
Goethe (left) is a little freaked out by Mill (right) and his lack of color. Mill just wants you to know he can see into your soul.
There are a few different candidates for “the last man who knew everything,” but two of the most frequent suggestions are John Stuart Mill and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Mill is best known for his writing in defense of democracy and civil liberties, but he wrote extensively on a variety of subjects. Goethe, on the other hand, is best known today for his play Faust (the classic tale of a man making a deal with the devil) along with many other plays and novels, though in his day he was also considered a great scientific and philosophical thinker.
Both started learning very young and never stopped. They each read anything they could get their hands on, not just stories and histories, but philosophy, theology, and science too (though Goethe was known more for the hard sciences and Mill for the soft). Neither had much formal school or university education, tending to receive private lessons, attend various public lectures, and of course, teach themselves instead.
Their wide-ranging mastery of learning was possible for three reasons:
- They started young
- They read quickly and never tired of it
- There weren’t as many books back then
Whew. That lets us off the hook a little. We can’t learn everything there is to know in our modern age.
Because no human could. There’s too much.
What about your business?
You can’t know everything there is to know about your business. That’s why you hire legal, financial, and marketing experts to help fill in those blanks. Once your business is big enough, you can’t even know everything there is to know about the very thing you do. That’s why a large corporation has enough department heads and senior vice presidents to fill a minor league hockey arena.
And that’s okay.
On the other hand, you could just live here for a few decades and try to catch up to Goethe and Mill. Look at all those books!
As your business grows, you know less and do less, but you have to focus a lot more. You need to cut away the fat and make the steak the main thing (that’s whatever you’re most excellent at knowing and doing). What matters then is who you partner with to help you achieve top performance in your industry.
When you’re looking for any kind of partner, don’t choose someone who’ll just do whatever you tell them. These are experts, after all. What’s the point of hiring them if you don’t want their advice?
If you want top performance, you need to work with talented partners who will push you toward that top performance.
If you’re looking for a partner to help you either figure out what your message is or how to tell it to the world in a powerful way, reach out. We’d love to help.