Read The Manual

Most things now, from your mobile phone through Excel and on to cooking, are way too complicated to be understood from A to Z in one lesson. There are subtleties about the use of a paintbrush or a screwdriver that only craftsmen know. Quick: why should a frying pan be heavier rather than lighter?

The more you know you can do, the more you will do. The more you know about your tools and materials, the more you can get out of them and the easier your life will be. But you have to read the books. Why? well, spreadsheet software has been with us now for over twenty-five years and some of the smartest people alive have worked on developing Excel, Calc and the others. You're going to learn everything it can do in a five-day course and a Dummies manual? I don't think so. And that's just one of the applications you're using.

A good manual can be a straightforward how-to: Haynes car manuals and O'Reilly software books are terrific examples. The Dummies books are good as well if you can live with the style. Sometimes "the manual" is a love-it-or-hate-it book that makes you think – hate McKee's Story or like it, but you will never think the same way about writing after you're read it. At the other extreme is something as gnomic as The Art of War: that is a manual, but you've got to interpret it. A J Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic is a clearly written and vivid manual - of how to apply Logical Positivism - and it made him famous. Categories for the Working Mathematician is a manual, and good luck.

A genuine manual does not promise to make you rich, tell you secrets, solve all your problems or otherwise change your life. Those are fakes, designed not to inform, but to mislead you into thinking that all it takes is a good idea and some trick of character. You're quite right to ask why if it works, the authors aren't millionaires as well.

The brain is a "use it or lose it" device: learning new stuff grows new neurons. You will learn stuff to do your job more easily and the other applicants didn’t. Read the manual.