Everyone you meet knows something you don't. The work is figuring out what.
The senior engineer at the substation has a calibration trick that is not in any manual.
The lineman has thirty years of failure modes the firmware will never catch.
The clerk at the DISCOM has a mental model of which feeders go down in which seasons that no SCADA dashboard captures.
The consultant in the suit has read more grid policy in three years than I will read in a decade.
The intern on her first project has a clearer view of which onboarding steps make no sense than the entire engineering team.
The vendor who sells you connectors has watched ten of your competitors fail before you.
The minister you meet for thirty minutes has had five conversations this week that touch the exact problem you are trying to solve.
The stranger at the conference dinner spent the last six months on a problem you are about to spend the next six on.
Every one of these people knows something you do not.
The asymmetry is the point.
The work — the real work, the work that compounds — is figuring out what. It is the asymmetry that matters. You walk into a room with one piece of information they do not have. They walk in with twenty pieces you do not. If you are doing the math right, you should leave that room richer.
But most engineers I meet, including a younger version of me, walk into rooms in send mode. They are presenting. They are pitching. They are demonstrating. They are not collecting.
I started keeping a small ritual: at the end of every meeting, I write down one thing the other person said that I did not already know. Not what was on the agenda. Something I would have missed if I had not been paying attention. Some weeks the list is long. Some weeks it is empty — and that means I was the one talking too much.
In the energy sector specifically.
This matters more in places like power distribution. The systems are old, the documentation is partial, and the actual operating logic of an Indian DISCOM lives in the heads of people who have been there for thirty years and will retire in five. If you cannot listen, you cannot ship. You will keep building things the field already learned do not work, fifteen years ago.
The most important question I ask in any meeting is not the smartest one. It is "what do you know about this that I would not know to ask?" That is the one that opens the door.
Originally shared on LinkedIn · Apr 2026 · Read on LinkedIn ↗