We’ve all had those conversations.
You’re talking about something with a small group of people. It’s a fun topic, but clearly nobody has really studied the subject.
It’s all speculation and guessing. Good times over beers.
And then, someone in the group starts spouting theories clearly pulled from their ass. They cross the line from uninformed speculation to self-convinced truth.
“What the hell are you talking about?” You might think about your friend’s little display of newfound “expertise.”
But he’s convinced himself that he’s right, and now he’s dug in. The psychological principle of consistency is at play now. Your friend (ahem, or maybe yourself) has committed to his position and has to stay committed in order to preserve his self image.
You eventually wrap up the argument and agree to disagree. You have a another beer or glass of wine and head home. You forget about the discussion after a day or two.
From Mild Annoyance to Dangerously Influential
On the small group level, this behavior might be mildly annoying, but it’s also interesting to watch. Sometimes it’s fun to participate in, for the sport of it.
But what happens when someone takes this show public? What happens when someone decides to spread his or her dangerously uninformed position with hundreds, thousands or millions of people?
You’ve probably seen this happen as well: an entire group of people follows one confident blowhard who brings 1% truth and 99% self-aggrandizing rhetoric to the discussion.
It’s as if the entire group has decided that no member shall introduce facts or actual expert opinion to the conversation.
Does this remind you of anything? American politics perhaps?
In The Lost Art of Becoming Good at Things, we argued that we’ve become a society of armchair experts who know stunningly less and less and yet have stronger and stronger beliefs. Entertainment is winning over intellect. The facts are sobering.
And here’s where I’d love to get your take on the other side of this coin, and the balance between the two.
At the same time, we’re advocates of the concept of being expert enough to accomplish your goals, whether modest or world-changing.
Becoming a superstar in many arenas might require 10,000 hours or more. But spending just 100 hours or even just 10 hours learning or practicing something could give you an edge on 99.99% of people on the planet.
Most people simply don’t study or practice. They worship at the altar of natural ability and assume it’s futile for them to try to get better at something. They rely on third-hand information and never spend a single hour reading actual source material.
Imagine if those people spent one hour with the facts instead of hundreds of hours in a cloud of rhetoric.
And how could your life be changed if you spent 100 hours deliberately practicing something. How could you use those skills to better your life?
What I’m asking is this: where is the line between being expert enough to accomplish a goal and being dangerously uninformed?
Let’s say you spent that 100 hours learning something. What does that qualify you to do? Can you teach others what you’ve learned? Start a blog? Can you hang a shingle and charge people for your fledgling expertise?
Or, are you just a marginally superior version of the uninformed masses we referred to before? Is that something to be proud of? How long do you need to study or practice before you can share what you’ve learned?
Now I’d love to hear what you think.
When are you expert enough, and when are you simply uninformed and unqualified?
Where is the line?
Feel free to cite specific examples or experience in the comments below.
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As one of the few college educated members of my family, I always wonder about this line. Does my psychology minor or philosophy minor really give me any ‘authority’? Or am I unknowingly talking out my backside and am actually wrong? Even though I’ve studied both of these subjects, and far more, it’s been a while since I’ve done anything with them. Are my older memories playing tricks on me, making me believe things that aren’t true?
I firmly believe that to be an expert, even an expert enough, you need to maintain your skills/knowledge in that area. You can’t just play three songs on a guitar and give lessons, never playing the guitar again. Even if you teach only those songs, you need to keep playing them.
I suppose that even if you are a recognized expert, your expertise can go away,, pushing you into the dangerously uninformed category.
Great points Matt. I think you’ve also pointed out one of the first steps to making sure you’re not simply uninformed: question yourself, your intentions and your knowledge. Those who are uninformed probably never bother.
“What happens when someone decides to spread his or her dangerously uninformed position with hundreds, thousands or millions of people?”
Tyranny, usually. In one form or another.
I’d call it “humanity,” as in, what constitutes most of our “Common sense.”
This is something I wrestle with as I move forward in my own life. At what point am I qualified to assist others? More important, when can I charge for this knowledge? I’m trying to be careful that what I bring to the table has real value and that I’m not compromising or taking advantage of anyone by over selling my “expert” status. Great post. Thanks for making me think.
Thanks for the comment Denise, happy to help you think through things.
In most areas, there will be plenty of people who can learn from your modest level of expertise and aren’t necessarily looking to learn from (or pay for) the deepest experts available.
Think of expertise not as an absolute, but as a sliding scale. If you’re a “3″ on the scale of 1 to 10, perhaps you can find a market helping the “1′s” and “2′s” of the world.
Corbett,
I’m inclined to believe that ANY experience is better than none, seeing as 99% of people (that vague number again) don’t have experience and love talking about the things they don’t have experience in.
It’s like every Thanksgiving dinner at my house — we get into diet discussions, where everyone has an opinion about what’s right yet they’re all fat as hell!
For chrissakes why would I take your opinion on diet and
fitness seriously when you are 50 lbs over weight? This is pretty typical of people.
The only people quiet are the ones who go to the gym, who eat right, and don’t believe all this diet BS and don’t go preaching it.. They just do it.
In that regard, I think ANY experience is worthwhile and valid – as long as it’s some. At least you can say, “Great, your opinions are valid and all, but I can tell you from EXPERIENCE — for whatever it’s worth.”
The two are worlds apart, for sure.
My 2 cents
Alex
Good point. Overweight people seem to know everything about weight but don’t necesarily apply it.
and it brings me to think that experience > knowledge.
It’s like going to college for business when the professor teaching you might never have owned a business.
I would take lessons from a founder/CEO of a company who might have not gone to business school but has owned a business for 20+ years and has seen the ins and outs of owning business.
Dangerously uninformed happens when self-perceived knowledge surpasses actual knowledge. This can happen at any stage of the learning curve.
Third year motorcyclists have a higher accident rate than 1st or 2nd year riders. The rate drops precipitously in the 4th year. This is often attributed to cockiness, where 3rd year riders believe they “know how to ride” before they actually do. In essence, the lack of skill among novices is more than compensated for by their caution. In year three they throw caution to the wind and crash because they thought they were finished learning.
It doesn’t take much expertise to help someone with no background or experience, but it’s important not to put yourself out there as if you know more than you actually do.
re: Spending just 100 hours or even just 10 hours learning or practicing something could give you an edge on 99.99% of people on the planet.
What I like about this is that 10 hours is so doable.
Corbett,
Expert enough or simply uninformed? Good question and I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately in one particular context.
Last summer I started taking skydiving lessons. In December 2011, I earned a license and have accumulated about 50 solo jumps. Here are a few comments that might relate to your post:
1) In the world of skydivers I am a huge ROOKIE! Often I get in plane full of jumpers and some have thousands of jumps while I haven’t even reached a hundred. But in the world at large, I have more experience than most everyone.
2) I would literally be dangerous in certain aspects of the sport. For example, I have training in how to pack a parachute but at this level I don’t rely on myself and certainly no one else would either. Also, I shouldn’t be a tandem instructor because I don’t even know how to use the equipment necessary for a tandem jump.
3) But in other areas I am expert enough. I can certainly do a safety check on my gear, ask questions when I’m not sure of something, evaluate wind speed/direction, make a safe exit from the plane, open clear of other jumpers, and land without being a hazard to aircraft or people on the ground.
4) Everyone has more to learn. The other day, as we were riding up to altitude, another jumper and I were laughing about how we both felt like we were still learning even though he had 700 jumps compared to my total of 50.
5) Don’t be afraid to be a beginner since it’s a necessary part of the process, no matter what the field of expertise.
6) Even though I am competent in some areas while dangerous in others, I am still expert enough to get the satisfaction of doing something that is magical. Maybe I’ll get more involved in the sport in years to come, but what I’ve done so far still seems amazing to me.
7) I don’t know if I will ever be an instructor but at this point I can tell people about my own experiences. . . . how I got started, what I learned, what it felt like etc. So I couldn’t hang out my “shingle” as an instructor but I do tell my friends about what I’ve been doing. Of course only a few, if any, want to jump. But I like to think my experiences may make them think more about their own interests and possibly pursue something they have been putting off.
Thanks for the post
Kurt
It’s a great question, and I think it can depend on who is doing the judging. In some situations you may need qualifications (e.g. to be a doctor). In others you may let others judge if you are expert enough (e.g. potential guitar students can listen to you play and decide if you are good enough to teach them). And sometimes you can make your own mind up (e.g. if you’re just doing something for a hobby.) I think you need that context before you can say whether you are expert enough.
One way is to give ways for people to verify things for themselves. If what you say checks out in their experience they will naturally look to you for helpful stuff. The other side is to only talk about what you have verified in your own experience – and stay open to others’ experience.
Spending just 100 hours or even just 10 hours learning something does gives us the edge.
We just need to get out there practice and get reasonable result before we can start telling others what to do, because that is what we are going to share with your audience.
We are all experts in our own right. We all have our own gift, knowledge and talent to share with the world.
Learning, with no practical result is just hot air.
I just made a comment on the post “5 Simple Steps to Becoming an Expert” and I think it’s relevant here as well.
Just master one small thing first and start teaching / selling that. In theory, that should alleviate a lot of the problems.
Really, that’s what happens when you get a job. They let you master one thing at a time. First you make coffee. Then you deliver the mail. Next your an assistant. (A little 1980′s here but I think you guys get my point). You master one thing, keep doing it, and start training for the next level.
This seems to get lost on budding experts / entrepreneurs.
I can hear someone saying:
“When can I hang my shingle up as a financial expert?”
Why don’t you learn how to create a household budget. Stick to it. And then show other people how to do it as well. Boom, you’re on your way to becoming an expert.
Anyone can master a specific set of instructions on how to do something and then teach it.
I think this post actually borderlines the discussion of when is it OK to position yourself as an authority. When can you start pushing your own beliefs and theories. Because in truth, it’s harder to get noticed online unless you are an authority.
This is where most people falter. You’ve gotta really put some elbow grease. It takes experience and a deep understanding of your industry to become an authority. You’ve gotta see what’s wrong / lacking and fix it. Unfortunately, that means you might have to do the mundane for a while and put that purple cow on hold.
That’s not a sexy idea to sell though!
Knowledge is fluid. An expert is only an expert to the current degree of available knowledge. The experts belived the earth was flat, man couldn’t fly, that if you sailed West from Europe you will find nothing.
The expert has always been the most convincingly knowledgeable one in the room. It just depends how big that room is.
When we really took action on something and experience it, when we accomplish something, when we can actually make something work and get results. It really doesn’t matter how big or small the results are.
Being expert enough, just as long as we don’t exaggerate the truth of what we experienced.
The difference is that credible experts willingly subject themselves to criticism. They do so because they have realized they need to, and so they have found a way to deal with the fear of criticism.
Here is why we need not worry about expert status, and instead should start with confidence in our actual status.
Yes, we are all to some degree unaware of how full of BS we are. But people aren’t really all that concerned with that. They just want to be sure that the BS isn’t so thick they have to wade through it. If you can solve their problems, the rest doesn’t matter.
Once we have overcome the fear of criticism, the question of “how expert is expert enough?” goes away. When your illusions are forcefully stripped from you, you are confident of what you can do. It becomes more like: You want this, i can do this, so let’s do this.
The greatest experts don’t care about their expert status. They primarily care about having an impact and solving problems for people, which is why people give them expert status in the first place.
They also shamelessly self-promote because they are confident. (Why would there be any shame in promoting oneself?) That is what makes them the best.
The best way I know to overcome the fear of criticism is to actively seek it out, as cheerfully as possible. It helps to realize that criticism is the best food for knowledge.