In this episode, we’re going to be talking about being an expert, or that is the people that we run into all the time that claim to be experts – what you need to know and even why it’s important. I want to go through that, the self-proclaimed experts. Why is it useful to know about that? Why is it useful to find an expert, not just somebody that’s a friend or an acquaintance, or somebody that knows a little bit more, but to locate experts? And why there is a difficulty in becoming one, but that’s good. I’ll explain that.

Welcome to another episode of Life Unsettled – New Path, Better Future. This is an interesting different swing on things in this particular episode, because here we are talking about a new path, better future, but what I’m going to do is warn you about some of the path and how you develop that path. What I want to talk about is this recent thing where people are pushing the idea of being an expert. Supposedly, and this is actually what gurus out there are doing, they’re telling people: “If you know a little bit more than the next person, you’re an expert to them.”

There’s really a disservice and a problem with that, and that’s what I want to get to. Let’s think about that for a little bit, and look at it as an interesting topic for what you would like to do with yourself and how you would build your own expertise in business. We’ll talk about how to do that in another episode coming up.

First I want to talk about the idea of being an expert. It’s interesting, because really the way an expert is defined by many of the researchers out there, psychologists, as well as operations, research, etc.… There’s one noteworthy thing back in the past, 1980 at Berkeley, there was a Professor Dreyfus, and they had a model of skill acquisition. They looked at it as you would go through this period going from novice, to competence, proficiency, expertise, and mastery. Why is that important and why is that necessary?

The interesting thing was there were another few things that were done where researchers made some very good points. David A. Dunning for one, Psychologist at Cornell, talked about the fact that incompetent people don’t even know they’re incompetent. At first I read that and I thought: “That’s kind of weird.” Really, how could this be? They’re supremely confident of their abilities. It’s kind of like: you don’t know what you don’t know. They don’t know the landscape, they don’t know how to evaluate. The BBC came out and said: “The more inept you are, the smarter you think you are.” If you are incompetent, you can’t necessarily know your level of incompetence. Why is this a danger if you know more than the next person and you’re helping them out? Then you’re a novice, that’s fine, but let’s think about it and revisit some of the fields existing out there where this may be a danger. Actually, I can think of just about every one of them.

I had somebody a few years ago, actually I went through three different people, for trying to get something for me to do for SEO for one of my websites. I believe that you have to know enough or find somebody else that knows enough to evaluate. You have to be able to evaluate. I knew enough to be able to evaluate, plus I had looked at some of the things having to do with problems and changes that Google had made, and what to be careful of, what not to do. It turns out that all three of these that I went through were all about to do things that were either already considered bad, or were going to be in the near future. These “experts” were going to harm me, yet they knew more than me. What do you do? You have to go out and find somebody, obviously, that has a great deal more expertise or evaluate it yourself.

What I did was I read Gary Vaynerchuk’s book, Crush It!