Don’t underestimate the knowledge transfer inherent in living with someone for an extended period of time who has a specific area of expertise. I once hired someone for a role that required a fair amount of knowledge of a particular topic who had zero. I hired them because they told me their spouse worked in that field for 20 years, and when I asked them a few basic knowledge-check questions, they answered every one of them with deep insight immediately.
You can’t live with a rocket scientist for twenty years and not learn something. If your parents were rocket scientists then, all else being equal, you will know more about that topic than someone whose parents weren’t. That doesn’t mean you’ll know more than someone who studied it directly themselves, but you’ll definitely know more than another person who hasn’t studied it at all, even if you haven’t either.
People don’t often realize this – in fact, often people get offended at the suggestion, or at least deny the size of the impact. But that’s taking for granted all the things you know that you learned this way. My mother spent her entire career in “Corporate America.” Before I ever had my first office job, I knew a ton about the way those cultures operated, the specific mores and nuances inherent in that world. I was able to navigate those strange waters more effectively than other people my age with their first office jobs because many of those people were “first-generation corporate” and didn’t know what they didn’t know.
I don’t want to take it for granted. It’s easy to scoff and say “I can’t believe that person would think it was okay to do XYZ in an office job,” but that’s forgetting that there’s no such thing as common knowledge. They didn’t make that mistake because they weren’t intelligent, they just didn’t know yet. I had a head start.
All that is to say, look for areas you already have that kind of “second-generation” knowledge and see what you can do with it that you might not have realized was in your wheelhouse. And whenever you can, share that knowledge with others. You never know what head start you might be giving to someone.
The Opportunity Machine 