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What can you do about the half-life of your professional knowledge?
With the exponential growth in information, professionals face a knowledge half-life dilemma.
I love the line in Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jone’s character says:
1,500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.
Half Life
A half-life is defined as the time taken for something to halve its quantity, most often used in the context of radioactive decay.
So what is this half-life of knowledge?
The half-life of knowledge is becoming more and more of an issue for you as a professional keeping up-to-date and protecting your future career.
It is the amount of time before half of your professional knowledge becomes superseded. Scary.
Samuel Arbesman in his book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date published in 2013, said that information has a predictable half-life, but the rate varies with topic area.
The body of engineering knowledge changes more slowly than for behavioural sciences, for example. In the health…
