The Expert Trap: Turns out A is Not B
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Hey Indiepreneurs,
A common theme in entrepreneurship is struggling with Imposter Syndrome, meaning that you feel like a fraud because you’re not the best at x,y, or z thing. You’re not like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Elon Must, three of the most popular people referenced on Entrepreneur.com.
It’s an interesting topic, one that I’m sure to discuss at another time.
What I want to talk about is the much less discussed but just as problematic Expert Trap.
We have this weird believe in our society. If someone is really good at something, then they must be really good at a whole bunch of things. It’s one of those beliefs that doesn’t hold up if you think about it for more than five seconds. But we usually DON’T think about it for more than five seconds.
The proximate cause of this rant is the Robinhood Gamestop fiasco. For those who shoved this even into the “ignore” bin in the back of your mind, the gist is that people were running up the price on Gamestop stock, and Robinhood temporarily banned people from buying stock.
People got mad. Really mad.
After the Fog of War settled a bit, it turns out Robinhood stopped people from buying stock because (a) to comply with laws requiring them to pause (laws designed to stop the plot of The Dark Knight Rises) and (b) they simply ran out of money.
But during the pause, people were losing their minds. A saw several headlines with a variation of “Even Elon Musk thinks Robinhood should continue trading Gamestop shares!”
Yeah…about that. What the heck does Elon Musk know about stocks?
I mean, yeah, he’s obviously a very smart guy. He has created some pretty cool technologies and made a ton of money. But this is the same guy who got fined by the SEC for making a 4:20 joke on Twitter. That’s hardly the only time he’s gotten in regulatory trouble for tweeting out impertinent, potentially illegal things. Things, I should add, that are illegal for a reason.
If I want to ask someone how to create a frictionless train system, I’ll ask Elon Musk. If I want trading advice, I’d be better off asking some random person off of the street.
But we fall into the Expert Trap. Elon Musk is smart, so he MUST know what he’s talking about. Even though he has clearly demonstrated multiple times that he does not.
I bring this up as a word of advice and warning. When you’re looking for help, make sure you’re looking in the right places. People who know what they’re talking about, who have some experience in the field that you’re working in. And, despite the natural tendency to think otherwise, it’s often not the “smartest” person you know.
On the flip side, treat criticism the same way. People are often more than happy to tear your work down, ESPECIALLY with the anonymity of the internet. If the troll doesn’t offer criticism with the purpose to help you AND they don’t have some pretty good bona fides, you should probably take the burn about as serious as Elon Musk tweeting about stocks.
The Links
- Speaking of Elon Musk, I like the idea of his carbon capture XPrize competition. A scientific solution for a scientific problem always seemed like a better way to succeed than politics.
- Just wanted to give a shout out to our current board game hobby: Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-Earth. Between this and Mansions of Madness, Fantasy Flight has figured out how to make this app supported game system work.
Service Dog Update
When we got Sherman, a member from our church who trains dogs came over and talked us through a few things. Since neither Amy nor I have really trained dogs, she talked through some of the developmental expectations, likely so we wouldn’t be freaking out when Sherman wasn’t magically superdog after a handful of training sessions.
One of her warnings was that since he was a boy dog, at some point during his adolescence he would become obsessed with scents. And boy howdy has he. Everything has a smell right now, and if we don’t let him smell it, he acts like it’s the end of the world. Since we can’t let him have his way on things like that as a service dog, it means there’s a lot of end of the world scenarios on our morning walk.
Another thing: Sherman is getting along with our cat Ceres (named for Ceres Station from the Expanse) most of the time. But on Friday night she was an absolute turd because we had to move her food bowl. Then Sherman got all riled up because she was riled up. We ended up with some scratched furniture (from the dog only, surprisingly enough) and a whole lot of pulling the two animals away.
