There are lessons we must pay for with our own time — erring, correcting, erring again. And there are lessons handed down to us, neatly folded, out of someone else's time. For me, the second kind is the fastest way of learning a human life allows. Our grandparents had a simple phrase for it: learn from those who walked before.
Why I care — in all honesty
I am not writing this as a collector of quotations. I write from where I stand. Around me right now are people whose road in their craft is far longer than mine. Đậu Trọng Hiển — more than twenty years walking alongside artificial intelligence, smart cities, and digital transformation; SmartSys, the brainchild he has been building since 2014, is now more than ten years old. Annie Nguyễn — sixteen years in communications and international trade promotion, now taking the helm at CD Restop. Added together, that is decades of craft. And I get to stand beside it.
Standing beside is a privilege. But a privilege only becomes a lesson when you know how to receive it.
Twenty years teach what two years cannot
The first thing I learned from Hiển was not technology. It was endurance. It is easy to be excited about technology for a season; he has walked with it for more than two decades — quietly, patiently, since the days those concepts were still foreign to most of us. More than ten years for a technology company in Vietnam is a number whose weight anyone who has worked in this trade will understand. That number teaches no tricks at all. It teaches something far harder: how to keep a conviction alive through the market's hot and cold seasons.
From him I learned how to build products: six shared technology cores, eighteen products raised on top — build once, reuse across every project, the way a master craftsman sharpens his whole toolkit before taking on the job. The one who goes the long road, it turns out, is not the one who runs faster — but the one who rarely has to redo.
From Annie I learned something else — a way of seeing. Looking at a piece of work, she does not ask how is this doing; she asks what does this deserve to become. Sixteen years in the trade gave her that eye: an eye that measures a thing by its future, not by its present state. I used to think it was a gift. Having stood beside her long enough, I understand it is the result of sixteen years of looking — looking so much it became reflex.
Learning by standing close
This way of learning appears in no curriculum. It lives in the small details we would step past if we hurried. I remember the questions Hiển asked beside the charging station — about the charging posts, the panels, the operating software — questions only someone who has wrestled with real systems would know how to ask. That day I realized: to know how far a person has traveled, do not listen to their answers — listen to their questions. Answers can be memorized. Questions must be lived into being.
So what do we do?
Four things I remind myself of — and want to pass on to young people just starting out:
- Find someone who has walked the long road in the very work you want to do. Books give us the map; those who went before give us a road already marked with footprints.
- Stand close for long enough. Twenty years of experience cannot be handed over in a single coffee — it seeps in through each time you work together, err together, mend together.
- Listen to the questions, not just for the answers. The way a person asks tells us how deeply they understand the craft — and teaches us how to understand.
- Treat trust with kindness. Those who went before hand us more than experience; they hand us their trust. Learning it through to the end is the only repayment worthy of it.
A closing word
I still believe what I have always believed: no one goes far alone. But the farther I go, the more I understand another layer of that saying: walking with someone who has gone far, we are not only less likely to lose our way — we also inherit a pair of eyes that already know the road. Hiển's twenty years, Annie's sixteen — I cannot live those years in their place. But I can learn from them, every day, with the gratitude of one allowed to stand close.
Someone else's time is a gift no one owes us. Our part — is to learn it through to the end.