Have a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing. No one knows enough to be a pessimist about anything.

-Wayne Dyer

I was at a business conference recently and there was a panel of ICT professionals addressing the audience. It was time for questions and a guy (we’ll call him Dark) asked a question, it was more of an expression of his opinions though and he had to be cautioned to go straight to the question severally. So in the end, Dark had two questions that were more of opinions, and the panelists started to answer. He refused to agree with their response and was shaking his head in disagreement while they responded, he even got a little vocal and said he doesn’t agree.

And I sat there and wondered, what is Dark’s reason for being here? What does he want? Does he want to be successful or right?

I know some ideas, principles and opinions that were unpopular have turned out to be revolutionary, but, I think those are the few exceptions. It is normal as humans to want to defend our stance, but I think that is for small-minded and ‘normal’ people. In my experience in order to be successful in any given endeavor, there is most times a lot of learning to be done, and that learning most times require ‘unlearning’ and ‘relearning’.

When I started out in business and started reading books and learning from professionals, I was shocked by how much I thought I knew that I didn’t. It was quite a challenge because I had some theories that I held very dear that were being murdered when I learnt something new.

So the next logical question is, at what point is a person matured enough to have unpopular convictions? When can you trust your gut or intellect on something that others don’t subscribe to. Well, that’s a tough question, and I don’t think there’s any right answer for that. I am a spiritual man so that quite colors my logical reasoning concerning this? If I were to base my answer on logic alone, I think I’ll go with Malcolm Gladwell’s opinion on the 10,000 hour rule which in simple terms states that for one to be a master at something, he must have dedicated 10,000 hours to it. A caveat though, Evan Carmichael believes not all hours are the same, and the 10,000 hours can be crunched down by smart learning e.g. learning from masters as opposed to learning on your own, and I agree.

This is interesting though, as it brings me back to Dark, you see, Dark is a relatively unknown guy working on a not-yet-successful business. If I were in his shoes, I would learn everything I could, soak up all the knowledge and opinions of others, try most out, start the distillation process, then get the gems out. That to me, is the way of the genius.