What is your knowledge debt?
More and more people are becoming aware of their financial debts. Wherever your debt is from, and for whatever reason you accumulated it, becoming debt-free has become a symbol of freedom. It’s not just freedom from a bank, but also the psychological freedom of how you get to spend your presence. People who get out of debt talk about how it allowed them to spend _presence_ with their family, because the burden of debt overshadows everything you do — from thinking about the actual number, to wondering how you will afford the future while feeling hopeless about dealing with the past.
But debt also comes in other forms.
When you work in a professional industry, your knowledge (which translates to your skills) is your currency. You trade specialized knowledge for money. While it’s easy to think that you’re being paid to start an IV, or to perform a physical examination, or to write a fitness program, that’s not where your value lies. Any unskilled labourer can be trained to perform the physical skills of your profession. It’s your knowledge of when to perform these skills and how to translate other incoming knowledge to other skills that you get paid larger dollars than unskilled labour.
Knowledge debt is not unlike financial debt. It starts to accumulate when you start to live beyond your knowledge means. It starts by shortcutting how you process information by allowing other people to do it. You convince yourself that you don’t have enough time to keep up. You start doing things (i.e. using your skills) because of things like, “That’s what the latest guidelines say,” or, “That’s the new policy,” or, “That was in the last research review.”
Before you know it, your knowledge debt can become so large, that you really have not much of an idea of why you are doing the things you do anymore, other than, “Well, that’s how I learned it in school.” You become a skilled labourer. And labourers can be easily replaced. And because the world didn’t stop while you dug yourself into a knowledge debt, getting out looks even more bleak than a bit credit card debt. Because you can’t just cut your expenses (i.e. your practice), and your practice isn’t getting any less busy, but your free time appears to be shrinking; and the tools you were given in school to process information in a clinically useful way are essentially useless.
You cannot get out of a knowledge debt just by working harder the way you’ve always worked at knowledge. Those days of having “study week” where you could inefficiently read your way out of debt are gone.
As with all things related to debt, getting out requires some pain. It involves restructuring not just how you spend your time, but how you think about the debt itself.
The first step is understanding and believing that you can get out of debt.
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