NRA’s Slogan Is Also Applicable For Knowledge

Thanks to Google, a lot of people believe that they should seek information only when they need it. Given the amount of information overload in today’s digital world, this seems to be a sane approach.

However, when it comes to knowledge, this approach is not likely to work because you’ll not know that you need it when you do. Therefore, it’s better to absorb all relevant knowledge as and when you come across it. What if you never need it, you might ask. My answer to this question would be something along the lines of “it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it”. Once used by the National Rifle Association as its slogan to promote firearms in the US – a fundamental right guaranteed by the US Constitution, BTW – this proverb is equally applicable for knowledge.

In my experience, people can Google for information “just in time” only if they have some prior knowledge about a certain subject. Without that prior knowledge, they won’t look for the related information and therefore end up doing a lot of hard work without much results to show for their toil. Let me illustrate this with a recent example.

A web design company had to use a certain color for all graphical elements on a page. They lacked the prior knowledge about the availability of standard tools like Color Detector that automatically carry out exact color matching. Because they “didn’t know what they didn’t know”, no one in the company thought of Googling for information about such tools. Instead, they did the only thing they could do – which was to manually match the color through a long and cumbersome trial-and-error process without realizing that there were over 16 million likely permuations and combinations. Unfortunately, despite several iterations carried out over  a long time, they couldn’t achieve an exact match, with the consequence that their customer was unhappy with their output and defected to another company for his next project.

If only this company had known about color matching tools in advance, they could’ve used Google to find sources for downloading them and used those tools to deliver far better quality at a fraction of the time. With that kind of smart work, they would’ve prevented the loss of an existing customer.