My boss, the CEO, said something today that I really liked. We were discussing someone at another company closely associated to ours and who had completely fouled up a major calculation that resulted in all sorts of erroneous billing.

Instead of relying on our expertise, this young, brash person who is also a know-it-all just decided to attempt to do the (very complicated) billing calculation himself rather than rely on someone in the company who is one of the top world experts in this type of business and had already offered to help.

Anyway, what my boss said was, “This isn’t school. There’s no A for effort. You don’t get it 90% right. You either get it right or you fail. Just because he wrote a valid SQL query doesn’t mean he knew anything else. And he doesn’t, but he’s learning that the hard way.”

He’s right. In the real world, there is no A for effort. You either get it or you fail. That’s a huge difference from school, and I bet it takes a lot of people a while — if they ever do — to make that transition.