Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀

This community started with friends and family and today one of the OGs steps in to deliver an important message about mastery. Steven Shorkey has mastered countless traits with an interesting career portfolio that includes Investment Banker, Creative Writer, Humorist, Storyteller, and Problem Solver.

Throughout our careers we master many things that we may not categorize as ‘important.’ But if we really take stock of our uncommon knowledge, we find many unique pieces that can only be leveraged by us.

Let's get into it.

This week’s guest author is Steven Shorkey: a retired investment banker, Steven spends his days immersed in creative writing (novels, short stories, scripts, articles).

In the mid-seventies, I jetted off to Belgium to spend eleven months as a foreign exchange student. My new home and school would be in Hasselt, in the Flemish (a spoken-only, dialectic version of Dutch) speaking region of that tiny country.

I was expected to take all of my senior year high school subjects in Dutch. To be clear, I was not a Dutch-speaker upon my arrival. So, in order to keep up with my subjects, I was desperately trying to learn the language. We were told that because of our total immersion—literally every waking moment—we’d become competent in our new tongue in about three months (which turned out to be accurate) and sometime later, fluent.

Sitting in Dutch class one day early in the school year (not a Dutch language class, but one similar to the English class US students take that focuses on grammar, vocabulary, etc.) I could follow along well enough (I should note the teacher never called on me in class, as he presumed I didn’t understand his lectures) to recognize that our teacher was admonishing us to use the proper Dutch word for everyday items that cropped up in our speech, rather than a shortcut version. For instance, in English we often call a woman’s purse her bag when it might more properly be called her handbag.

One example he used was vuilnisbak, the Dutch word for trash can. One would often hear that refuse container referred to as a vuilbak, leaving out the nis portion of the word.

Fast forward to the same class near the end of the school year. I don’t recall the lecture topic, but it involved the teacher constantly turning to write lengthy sentences on the chalkboard (yes, this was the low-tech 70’s). Each time he turned his back, one student—a notorious class cut-up—would stand at his desk and throw a wad of paper at someone across the room, usually hitting his target with a “thwack,” and causing a titter of subdued laughter. Predictably, after several incidents, the teacher feigned his turn toward the board, and then turned back in time to catch the student in mid-throw.

He sternly scolded my friend and insisted he collect the wads of paper and throw them in the—vuilbak.

I immediately spoke up: “Nee, Meneer, hij moet zeker de papieren in de vuilnisbak gooien.” Translation: “No, Sir, surely he must throw the paper in the vuilnisbak.”

Naturally, the class broke into a raucous chorus of laughter: the American correcting the Dutch teacher. The teacher smiled at me and applauded my observation.

It was a lesson I never forgot. Mastery has a way of sneaking up on us.

Throughout our career, we are in the trenches every day, learning how to run and improve our business, and deciphering all the events and factors that bombard us constantly. While there are some obvious ah-ha moments, most days we unconsciously file away lots of information that we refine, expand upon and draw from throughout our careers. It’s easy to believe we haven’t mastered many things in the course of our working life. But that’s seldom the case.

Senior business people have had multiple vuilnisbak moments. Your true value lies in your hard-earned mastery. You know your stuff, perhaps even better than the practitioners you learned from. You have a lot more to offer the business world than you know.

Now go launch something 🚀

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