An Artificial Expert

When you’re an expert, you have confidence in your abilities, earned through practice and skill.

When you’re an expert, you don’t think twice to figure out the best way forward, you have an intuitive sense, at the very least about which models apply to the situation.

But when you’re not an expert, you battle doubts, you confound edge cases with norms, you don’t know where to start.

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The good news: you can start becoming an expert in a new field, because you’re not a beginner at everything. Being an expert in one field means being an expert in knowing how to learn something on your feet.

One of the ways to accelerate expertise is to port over your strategies from another area of expertise. How you make projects happen, how you name your beliefs so you can rewrite them, how you advance in the unknown.

To advance in the unknown, one trick in particular is to pretend you’re already an expert, that is to say, you pretend you’re at the end of having done something successfully, a form of visualization, and you ask yourself: “What am I celebrating having done?” “I’m celebrating having obtained a first success on a small familiar aspect, and building from there.”

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No, you won’t become a real expert overnight. But there’s no reason to use false humility when it’s within your reach to change from an “I can’t” mindset to a “let’s pretend like I’ve done this before” mindset.

They say “To get something done, give it to the busiest person.” Expertise is a bit overrated anyway. In a changing world, it’s the resourceful person, the expert at developing new expertise, that’s the most useful expert.