Being able to repeat a set of facts or procedures is not the same as being able to explain why a set of facts or procedures exist or continue to exist.
This is the difference between rote knowledge and reason.
Both can be effective, but reason has greater potential to be useful in the long run.
The telephone directory business, Yellow Pages, followed the same basic formula for over 100 years: gather the telephone numbers of businesses, organize them by category, print them into a thick yellow book, slap some ads on it for revenue, distribute, and repeat.
When Yellow Pages was founded in 1886, this probably made the most sense — this was the best way to do it.
But at some point, the way Yellow Pages operated became rote — that is to say, it continued to operate in the same way for no compelling reason other than they used the same processes last year and the year before that. That’s the definition of rote.
When Elon Musk, his brother, Kimbal, and their other cofounder, Greg Kouri, pitched putting the iconic directory on their online directory, Zip2, to an executive director at Yellow Pages, the director infamously threw the book at Musk and said, ‘You ever think you’re going to replace this?’
He wasn’t being sarcastic.
Eventually, Zip2 proved its ability to swim while Yellow Pages continued to sink. In a competition of who could gather information, sell ads, and distribute information more effectively (it was searchable with maps to boot!), Zip2’s online infrastructure was far superior.
Because Zip2 wasn’t founded until over 100 years later, the relatively new organization arguably didn’t have much rote knowledge to fall back on. Their only path forward was to use reason by asking the question: “given what we’re trying to accomplish, what set of tools is best for the job?”
This is probably the same question that was asked when Yellow Pages was formed.
Rote knowledge is an efficiency play by the brain. When something works long enough, it’s natural to stop questioning why or whether it’s still the best way to do something.
It is because of this tendency that it’s especially important to force the question, “why do we do things this way again?”, on a periodic basis.
Reason naturally becomes rote and stays that way if we do not question it.