The existing order of things is just that, and it's open to change. Here's a quick for instance. I just celebrated my 48th birthday and I've been tying my own shoes for about 45 of those years. So, imagine my surprise when I learned I've been doing it wrong! This video is Terry Moore recorded at a TED Talk (and certainly one of their lighter ones, watch some of the amazing others too):
The idea that I might have reached this age and been tying my shoes wrong all these years was too silly for me not to give this technique a try, and of course Mr. Moore's comments are exactly right. I no longer bother with the double knot I've always tied, my laces don't loosen during the day and it took me perhaps two days to revise my habits.
I'm a smart guy, so naturally this leaves me questioning basic knowledge I've been relying on and that's a good thing. For nearly 300 years starting about 300 BC the Library of Alexandria was the central repository for the collected wisdom of civilization. It was well-funded and collected, some say, more than 500,000 books (papyrus scrolls) and after 300 years of active collecting it was a remarkable collection.
Now that collection could exist on a single hard drive or memory card and today's equivalent of the Library of Alexandria is the internet, in many ways fast becoming our central repository for the collected wisdom of our civilization, but our Library of Alexandria is available to everyone on the planet.
The fantastical hopeful thing about this is that this collection of knowledge is so incredibly vast and contains so much valuable and relevant information for all of us. A few days ago I learned how to tie my shoes and yesterday I learned about how to thwart VOIP hackers from the former Eastern Bloc. Tomorrow will be different, but always interesting!
I enjoy when a client or colleague asks me what I think makes me good at my work because I've thought about this and have an answer at the ready; I'm good at forgetting (OS 6 and 7 and 8 and 9 and how to rebuild a desktop and which extension gets corrupted when you install this or that application) and I love to learn new things.
This is a great time to learn new things and use that knowledge to change the status quo and now more than ever that knowledge is right there for the taking, even if it's as simple as tying your shoes!