An Introduction to the Knowledge Worker Curriculum
[5 February 2024]
Welcome. I'm inviting you all on a journey that I call the Knowledge Worker Curriculum. It is a collection of short essays about things I wish I had known when I set out on this project. My initial idea was simple in concept, but challenging in execution. I'd write a book about those topics that we should learn about in school, but don't. I quickly ran into some challenges. First, I didn't know anything about writing a book. Second, life got in the way.
I first started thinking about this project in 2018. My wife and I had a sabbatical planned for late 2020 and I was thinking about what I wanted to do. We would move to British Columbia for most of the year, first to Vancouver Island for the fall and then to the interior to spend the winter skiing. We would homeschool the kids, write, hike, and ski. Simple. As a warmup, we did some skiing in British Columbia in March 2020. The conditions were glorious: tons of snow and bluebird sun every day.
And then they weren't.
The news reports from far-off Asia about this thing called COVID-19 came crashing home. The resort abruptly closed. An announcement came on the PA one afternoon saying it was last run… for the season. The resort wound down but we stayed on with my elderly in-laws. We were on that mountain for the next six weeks!
We returned home to a different world. Everything was shut down. Things would open up, only to close again. Our sabbatical loomed. Should we go? Yes. And we did. Vancouver Island was barely touched by COVID… until it was. And we were able to ski, even with a wide variety of public health restrictions.
I wrote, but not in the way I had imagined. I didn't know how to write a book… but, as an analyst, I could write research notes. Instead of writing from a detailed outline I simply wrote about what I thought I should be writing. Little did I know that COVID was to be the most minor of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that we would face over the next few years. But still I wrote, if only in the quiet times of the day and to silence the demons of dread and keep the black dog at the door.
The project started before we set out on our sabbatical but it has never really drawn to a close. I continue to write. What I haven't been doing, however, is publishing. My initial publication date has come and gone but my resolve to put a bit of my voice out into the world has only grown stronger.
It's time to hit the publish button.
The Knowledge Worker Curriculum is a series of essays on things that I feel are important. My inspiration is Michel de Montaigne who embraced the essay as a literary form. His work was derided by contemporaries as overly autobiographical, leading to his quip "I am myself the matter of my book." In the process, he gave us all a treasury of insight that, four hundred years later, can still entertain and enlighten.
I will present the essays in some rough sequence but they can, for the most part, be reviewed in any order. I will also occasionally interject something new or different, just because I can. My intention was to create -- as the name suggests -- a kind of curriculum for knowledge workers. The collection is still that, but it's also something else. Stay tuned.
Enjoy.
George