On the Importance of Knowledge as an Early Indicator of Success

I find myself having conversations daily with peers from my cohort in the field of software engineering, most of whom exhibit startlingly consistent patterns of thought. The first is the presence of imposter syndrome. Nobody (I use these broad sweeping terms loosely here) seems confident in their ability to be successful. The second is a reverential deference to successful people and all that they think and say. I wanted to address both these patterns individually here.

When pressed further on why people have imposter syndrome, they seem to think they’re somehow less knowledgeable and capable than their peers. To me this is in the realm of the unconscious where individuals unwittingly adopt a point of view without realizing it, and then spend the rest of their lives retroactively justifying that point of view with any and all correlatable observation — an effective reversal of cause and effect. On the reverence for parochial luminaries, it appears people are unable to separate chance from effort, attributing nearly all success to knowledge and effort rather than the more reasonably rational combination of timing, social support, network, and pure dumb luck. Sure, effort increases your chances of success, but as anyone who plays Poker knows, you can do everything right and still lose.

So why then do I give such little importance to knowledge as a prerequisite for success? It is because knowledge is the most transient attribute of character. I can use myself as an example; when I was learning programming, the Internet did not exist and I had to painstakingly comb through dirty, dusty bazaars of Karachi for months at a time before I could find a single book about programming. In about a year of trying I managed to find only four (which are still kept up on a bookshelf in my ancestral home alongside a Collier’s Encyclopedia set) but those were sufficient to quench my thirst for knowledge. The books too had missing pages, missing companion material (floppy disks or CDs), were distressingly terse and not beginner friendly at all. That same knowledge is now available in the palm of my hand through extravagant, well produced YouTube videos explaining complex concepts in great detail constructed by an entire ecosystem of content creators with varied intended audiences. Being knowledgeable on a topic now is an embarrassingly low bar — that someone ripped themselves away from being otherwise nose-glued to TikTok memes and Instagram Stories, and dared to meander fleetingly across programming related content for 40 seconds. Even this extremely low barrier is now defunct with the ability of LLMs to be increasingly good at synthesizing the entire corpus of human knowledge and distilling it into a relevant answer for any question you may care to ask. In the past it meant something to have acquired knowledge. This is no longer true.

Knowledge is cheap, abundant and prevalent.

So why then is everyone not an expert at their craft? The answer lies in the more stable attributes of people’s character, those that only change through great and deliberate effort: curiosity, courage and grit. To be curious enough to look at the world around us and wonder how it fits together, and how it all works. To have the courage to make the difficult decisions, to change our careers, accept our shortcomings, leave the comfort of what we have always known, take chances to be great and to risk losing what we cherish in order to gain something more valuable. And to be resilient in the long, lonely and inevitable hardship that simultaneously guards and gives meaning to all success.

These are the quintessential attributes I look to cultivate in myself, and deeply value in those I hire and work with, more than what knowledge they presently possess.