Resourceful me

Resourcefulness

What is a resourceful person? Merriam-Webster (2010) defines resourcefulness as a person that can meet situations. Anyone who knows anything about people and/or human resources knows that sometimes people inflate their knowledge of something and/or there are people who believe they have the necessary KSAs (knowledge, skills & ability) when they really don’t. How does one differentiate? Testing, that’s how.

As for my KSAs, I purposely gave myself a low excel and general MS Office score on my Monster.com self-assessment because who am I to say that I am any kind of expert or good at all? Yes, I can do some correlations, scatter plots and Cartesian graphs (you like that, huh?) on excel, but then who can’t? I write formulas, but there is so much more to know, when will I ever really learn it all? Plato wrote that his mentor, Socrates, logically claimed (Plato, BC) that he [Socrates] could not have taught the children of Athens that there was only one God because he was not a teacher (Plato). Yes, he did spend time at The Academy (name of the school?), but because he himself was not finished learning, he in essence, didn’t know anything at all and could not be considered a “teacher.” (Plato, BC)

But how can you be resourceful?

When I worked for a small music label, one of the assistants told me everything is 2 phone calls away. I was 18 and very impressionable then. I also (constantly) heard from my employer, that if I was weak, he would also be perceived as weak – another blow to my 18 yr old self. What was I to do? I had to learn very quickly to not only anticipate the needs of my employer but be able to figure out everything else. I had to be this imaginary thing: resourceful without anyone’s physical guidance. I am thankful for that.

I am thankful that my ethnicity, my upbringing (nature & nurture) has made me fighter, an overachiever, a perfectionist. I do not expect anything less than the best from myself, my peers, my spouse, my child, and certainly my employer.

I know how to get the information, do you? Food for thought (and Wikipedia is not a reliable source!).

~CT