A good personal example I might cite is within the field of GPS surveying. Our firm got our first single-frequency receivers in 1992, whereupon I set out to learn all I could about the subject. I quickly realized that there was a lot to learn—but that realization didn’t take it far enough. I remember thinking in those early days, “Wow, there’s more to this stuff than I thought. It’ll probably be months before I’ve learned enough.” Well, it’s been months, all right ... as in several dozen months. And guess what? I don’t feel that I’ve learned “enough” even yet. Oh, I’ve written lots of columns and articles on the topic and given some seminars. And on the whole, my understanding of GPS is probably adequate to work through most day-to-day issues. But new insights and, yes, challenges pop up on practically every project. A surveyor assumes he knows it all at his own peril.

One of the most fertile fields I’ve run across for harvesting new knowledge is the surveyor’s bulletin board www.rpls.com. If you’re not a regular reader of the messages, questions, answers, random thoughts and plain old yakking that goes on in that forum, then you are definitely missing something. Although not every statement that appears on the board is necessarily 100 percent correct, there are enough careful (read: picky) readers to set most of the wayward thoughts straight. Add to that ad hoc review panel a host of nationally recognized experts, including former and present NGS luminaries Bill Strange and Dave Doyle, and you have a treasure of information sources that costs nothing but the time it takes you to read the content.