Gaining New Knowledge Alongside the Old

A quote recently caught my eye and seemed like good blog inspiration:

“Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.” — Larry Niven

So often it is easy to get into a rhythm or system and feel like you surely know all there is to know about what you are doing. The thing about nails is that sometimes we learn from someone who learned from someone and our information is not coming from a fact-based source. Maybe you learned from the nail person at the salon who learned from the one before her, and so on.

If the system works, then it should be left alone; don’t fix what isn’t broken — that seems good in theory yet can lead to poor decisions. Are you content to be doing the same thing that your predecessors were doing for the same price? Would you rather improve your skill and your income? Some salons are insulted when I encourage them to let their new professionals be more educated than the ones before, so let’s look at it from a different perspective.

The salon is a family. If the first generation of nail professional does OK and gets by, then imagine she is the generation that graduated from high school. If the next nail professional is trained by her and does only what she is taught by her, then she is going to stagnate at that same level. If she is allowed to seek outside education then she could be the first in the family to go to “junior college.” That means she has the potential to make more money and live a better quality of life. The next generation could make it to “college,” and so on. In theory the “family” should want their children to have more success than the parents.

Using that as an image, each nail professional who is brought in as the senior nail professional is ready to pass information on to the next generation. The next nail professional has the ability to learn from the existing professional many of the things that can only be taught by a patient mentor in the salon. Additionally, she can learn updated information in outside classes so the two can be combined for an overall education that gives her the ability to earn a great living and thrive.