After reading the excellent post on Henrik Karlsson’s blog, I started thinking about the model he described and had a few thoughts of my own, which you can find below. This post is not meant to give definitive answers or explanations, rather it is meant to make you think about these things yourself, as I hope you will.
Recap
Do read his article first, it contains much more than the cherry-picked topics I use here
Henrik described in his post that there’s two modes we can navigate life with and which we can use to build mental models. He calls these two modes “explore” and “exploit”. Although he goes much further in detail, I’m going to keep things simple and short.
Exploring means that we put out our feelers and we sample. We search and we try, we are open for new experiences. In this mode, we try to update our mental models; Are our assumptions of the world still holding true? Exploiting on the other hand, means acting on all the knowledge we’ve gathered in one of the previous explorations and acting on it.
These are some random thoughts which I looked at in a explore-exploit context.
Explore - curiosity
It stands to reason that people who are of a more curious nature, would gravitate towards exploring. This is something that - for example - children tend to do, trying everything and creating models of everything around them. More than only children, adults also have a certain level of curiosity in them. Depending on your character, how you were raised and several other factors more or lesser so.
Exploit - discipline
The other fase we described is more grounded, connecting with something we learned and trying to understand it in a deeper context. Often, this requires discipline, especially in the beginning. Depending on how curious you are, focusing on one subject and really diving in is difficult. Speaking from experience, often it’s easy to focus the first days, but it gets harder to stay focused (novelty wearing off?).
Self help addiction
Self help addiction is the act of consuming self help information, without acting upon it. Always exploring, but never exploiting, thus maybe gaining insights and information, but never focusing on how to implement these in your life.
Explore;exploit creates branches
Taken in the context of knowledge, we can also see how the explore and exploit modes create a network of knowledge. What this network looks like, depends on what you focus on to explore and exploit and how long to do this.
Imagine having knowledge and experience in one field, then moving on to a totally different field. While you haven’t really exploited the new field yet, your exploration will definately look different because of the transferrable knowledge (and experience!) from your previous field.
This can impact how you solve problems and maybe bring some novel ideas to the field you’re in. Not only knowledge, but also professional behavior is transferred. You could argue that this is knowledge as well, but on another branch.
Conclusion
Although this post was rather random, I hope it made you think about these concepts in a more clear way and it will be beneficial to you in any way.