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Some of our students sometimes ask, "Do I have sufficient background?"

Corliss answers, "No, but it doesn't matter."  Read on.

In this business, whatever you know is never enough.  You wish you knew more.  I wish I knew more.  So does everyone else.  It is impossible to understand even a single topic completely.  I've never had a course in the material I teach.  I learned what I know from reading and listening.

If you think you must understand completely before you can be effective, you may as well go back home.  You'll never understand completely.  Neither will anyone else.  There is too much to know, and it changes too fast.

School trains you to expect that you should know everything.  That has its place, but in this field, that attitude is deadly.  Instead, you must learn to act wisely on the basis of partial information.  Learn how much is good enough.  The basis for comparison is not perfection, it is the current state of affairs.  If you can improve on the current state enough to be worth the cost, we come out ahead.

I don't want to be perfect (which is good, since I'll never be anyway).  I just want to be better than my competition.

They tell the story about two men being chased by a bear.  One stopped to tie his shoe.  His friend said, "Why bother?  You can't outrun the bear anyway."  The first man replied, "I don't have to outrun the bear.  I only need to outrun YOU!"

"Tying your shoes" is learning to learn.  You many not know everything, but you should be able to learn anything.

Point 2: Focusing on what you see as lesser background is not helpful if you allow that to become an excuse for not stepping forward.  I agree there are people whose background is stronger.  So what?  If you say, "I can't ...," you are correct.  You can't.  If you say, "Let's see if I can ..., you might be correct.  Perhaps you can.  If you do not try, I guarantee you will not succeed.  If you try, you might fail as if you had not tried, but you just might succeed.  If you know any statistics about expected value, you see that the expected value of trying is greater than the expected value of not trying, no matter what you think of your background.