The Danger Of Skipping The Apprenticeship Stage
Rush too quickly and you will only burn yourself.
I get it.
You want to catch your dreams. You want freedom. Do your own thing. Be your own boss. Build something awesome.
You won’t get there by running straight into a wall.
That’s what most people in that position are doing. They just start doing something. They try whatever comes to their mind.
They get so lost in action, that they forget the bigger picture.
They have something in their minds that they want to achieve, but they don’t know…
… which skills they need
… what steps they need to take to get there
… which resources are required for this
… what a realistic time-frame for such a project looks like
You can learn all these things in an ‘apprenticeship’
In a traditional apprenticeship, a student has worked for a master, essentially in return for acquiring the master’s knowledge and expertise. More often than not, this relationship has gone on for years at a time, until the student was truly ready to work as an independent practitioner in that particular field of work.
In today’s world, apprenticeships in their traditional form hardly exist at all.
Hardly any entrepreneur, writer, or whatever other profession it is you are trying to master, still is willing to take somebody under their wing for years in order to teach them the basics of that profession.
Likewise, hardly any youngster still is willing to dedicate years of his or her life for a process of “learning from the masters” for nothing but the experience.
Unfortunately.
Ryan Holiday for example, has dropped out of college to start his career working as an unpaid intern for Robert Greene, author of the 48 laws of power.
Today, at age 30, he has written 7 books, all of which have achieved considerable degrees of success.
Of course, a lot of stuff has happened for him in-between that, but the apprenticeship he did nonetheless laid the foundation for his future career.
Did I personally do something like an apprenticeship?
Not really.
But I regret it quite much.
The time that I was working with my former coach, Daniel Wright, has been one of the most productive in me life in terms of pushing my own development further.
It helped me to be accountable to somebody. It helped me to bring an external perspective on my work work. It helped me by having somebody with a very different skill-set than my own, assess what I am doing. And it helped me not loose track of the bigger picture.
And that was the result of only one meeting a month.
Now, if I imagine what it would have been like to have access to somebody with significantly more experience than myself every single day, I am sure that it would be an incredible learning experience.
Actually, now that I am thinking about it, my first job has spoiled me quite badly.
It was a year-long volunteering project as an English teacher in Indonesia. During the project, I had significant freedom in terms of designing my own teaching program.
After that experience, I never really dealt well with restrictions in terms of my creative freedom and my work.
Instead, looking back at the experience, it would have probably been better to be working closely under somebody with very close supervision.
In this way, I would have learned the most important skill of all: to have the necessary self-control to deliver a project from beginning to finish.
Skipping the apprenticeship stage means learning stuff the hard way
An apprenticeship is essentially a safe environment that allows you to practice your skills in a certain field without facing a significant degree of risk such as not being able to pay the bills, or going in debt because of some serious mistake.
You are providing your time to help somebody get closer to whatever goal they have for the sake of learning from their expertise, and growing to the point where you are capable of replicating these things on your own.
So what happens when you skip that stage?
Once again, you’ll most likely run straight into a wall and hurt yourself.
You’ll make some serious miscalculations in your business and go into debt. At the minimum, you’ll suffer through years of not being able to make enough money to sustain yourself, and live a lifestyle that is pure struggle and hardship for the sake of reaching your dreams.
This is basically my own story.
It has been five years of trying to build my career as a blogger and self-employed intercultural trainer, and I am still struggling to make a decent living from it.
Whenever I was seriously struggling financially, my mind eventually strayed away from the path towards achieving its goal.
All sorts of other opportunities started to look attractive, and suddenly I found myself doing something I didn’t like the the sake of keeping my head above the water.
In other words, those five years haven’t been five years at all.
It’s more that I have been working on it on-and-off, with some serious distractions along the way. Yes, there were times where I stopped working towards achieving my goals for months at a time.
Plus, in the end, none of these other projects ever led anywhere, as I was never able to put my whole heart into them.
There are essentially two choices:
- Figure out a way of doing an apprenticeship under somebody who has already achieved what you are trying to do, and learn everything you can from them in a safe environment.
- Try figuring out everything on your own. This process will be harder, you will struggle a lot, and you will be anxious throughout the whole process.
Perhaps after reading my article, you assume that I am completely and 100% advocating for the first choice.
That is not necessarily the case.
In hindsight, a long period of struggle can be a good experience in itself.
It can teach you what real hardship means, and how to deal with such a situation on your own, without help and without any resources other than your own drive to push through.
Perhaps, people who are following their own path have the advantage that they are mentally ‘tougher’ than people who are going through an apprenticeship first.
And, perhaps, lessons that you have learned on your own accord through failing over and over again, are burning themselves into your psyche much stronger than lessons which you have learned in a safe environment.
But here’s my question:
Are you really willing to sacrifice your time now for your own future?
Because that’s what choosing the second option really means.
You are going to spend the whole day from morning till night trying to figure out how to stay in business, how to make ends meet, and how to get closer to your goals.
Your mind is likely to become so focused on your work that you can hardly think about anything else, let alone enjoy it.
You will become anxious. Afraid of the future. And, during the times that you are not working, a mental wreck.
Why? Because you simply can’t know whether you will ever succeed or not.
Because deep down, you are insecure about whether you are following the ‘right’ path or not.
Because you’re relying on yourself, and yet you don’t know whether you’ve got it in you or not.
Slow, but steady growth versus rapid, yet unstable learning
I don’t know the right answer when it comes to choosing between the two options. But somehow, I believe that both of them will lead to the desired results eventually.
Perhaps, the way of the apprentice takes more time. Perhaps, it is a slower growth in the sense that it will be harder to eventually make the shift towards doing your own thing. Perhaps, in this way you’ll never learn to really struggle your way through.
Perhaps, the rapid growth of the pure entrepreneur involves much more risk. Perhaps, the chance is higher that this lifestyle choice will break you eventually. Perhaps, you are going to regret the ‘lost years of your twenties’ once you are getting older.
I simply don’t know what the ‘right’ choice looks like.
But if you really want to be an entrepreneur, a freelancer, an artist or a self-employed person of any kind, then these are basically the two options you have in terms of getting to the point where you are skilled enough to make a living from what you want to do.
One is slow and steady. The other is rapid, yet unstable.
One requires you to sacrifice your dreams temporarily in order to focus on acquiring the necessary skills first. The other requires you to sacrifice many aspects of your life at a young age, for the sake of building the foundations for your future.
You yourself need to know which option suits you better.
Some final words:
If you want to go the apprentice route, then you will have to actively work on building such an opportunity. And you will have to be aware of what exactly you are trying to get out of this situation.
Choose your ‘master’ carefully. To do that, ask yourself things like:
- what skills do I need to learn in order to reach the goals I am trying to achieve in my life?
- under what conditions am I most likely to learn these skills?
- what other conditions need to be fulfilled in order for me to take on a role as an apprentice (e.g. pay, housing etc.)?
- how long am I willing to commit to such an apprentice/master relationship?
- who is likely to be the best person to teach me these skills? How can I reach him or her? What do I have to offer to him or her?
Lastly, I would like to end this article with a quote from a reader, who has commented on one of my previous articles. I found this quote to be a very good summary this whole topic:
“In the sexiness and appeal of autonomy, it seems that many ignore the need for the apprenticeship stage. And it is to their own detriment” — April Arnold
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