Recently I came across the idea of the competent man, which partly sums up the direction in which I am currently heading. In the wikipedia article the author Robert Heinlein summarises the idea as follows:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.“
This idea follows from the specialisation vs wide-knowledge debate that I have briefly written about in the past. I’ve gradually decided over the past few years that I want to move in the wide-knowledge direction. It means I pass up the possibility of going far in academia, but I never had a great desire to follow that path anyway and I think the wide-knowledge direction will be ultimately more wholesome and beneficial. University was largely a time of specialisation in intellectual activities, particularly mathematics. In contrast, over the past few months I have really been trying to get some new practical experiences with the aim of obtaining knowledge, and more importantly, experience in a range of new areas. I see university as the ’solve equations’, ‘analyze a new problem’ and ‘plan an invasion’ part of Heinlein’s description, but that leaves an awful lot of things left to learn. The smallholding has taught me how to ‘butcher a hog’ and ‘pitch manure’ and a whole host of other physical things.
I think my list would have many more things than Heinlein’s (I’m sure he didn’t mean it to be complete), ‘bring up a child’ and ‘be content in himself’ are the two that most readily some to mind. I don’t think I could ever produce any sort of exhaustive list, and of course that is part of the point. The Competent Man needs to move as he himself changes and as the world around him changes, it could be argued that the most important train of the Competent Man is that he is always growing, always moving forward. That’s my plan.
for a long time, without knowing others had written about this concept, this is the ideology i have been aiming for. i remember before my 18th talking to my parents in one of the rare times we sit down and discuss the future. they asked me what i wanted out of life, at the time i didn’t have a clear idea of a career or a direction and so i thought about it for a minute and came back with ‘everything’.
as you said, the breadth of all human knowledge is so expansive that in order to know just a tiny bit in its entirety would take a lifetime.
there is one aspect of being the Competant Person that i didn’t notice listed but is more or less implied: personality. thinking back to it, this is described very well by Kipling in his poem ‘If’. also it’s important to me to point out that the imagery does conjure an image of a man. personally i see a man of the early 20th century, pipe in mouth striding across a field, and as such there does feel like theres a sexual bias.
i do feel that being Competant is a subconcious goal of all humanity, but it doesn’t just happen. it requires drive, will power, and the realisation that being Competant is not something to be lorded over others but used to help them.
when i grow up i want to be Competant
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm
Awesome, I love that poem. I think the driving priority of the competent man has to be his moral integrity; there’s no point having loads of skills if they’re not going to be used to benefit the world.