Have you ever felt like you don’t know what you’re doing? Guess what, no one else knows what they’re doing, either.
Not long ago i ready an article that covers just this topic, and i immediately related to the first paragraph.
Have you ever received praise, or even an award, for being great at something despite having no clue what you’re doing? Do you feel like a fraud, wondering what sort of voodoo you’ve unwittingly conjured up to make people think you know what you’re doing, when the reality is quite the contrary?
That’s me. Especially the part about the voodoo that i’m somehow conjuring to make people think i know what’s going on.
JangoSteve breaks it down with some pretty convincing visuals. Most of us start out with a pie graph of knowledge that looks like this. (Note: the graph is not to scale, the red slice is much larger than shown.) As you grow, your goal should be to take as much stuff out of the red slice as possible. JangoSteve says that it actually doesn’t matter whether your new knowledge goes into the green or the blue slice, so long as you take it out of the red zone. The red zone is what makes you dangerous, because in that area you’re making decisions where you have no idea what you’re doing AND you have no idea that you don’t know what you’re doing.
As we grow, we eventually do add more knowledge to our green slice. If we’re doing it right, we should also add a lot more knowledge to our blue slice. The blue slice is stuff that maybe we’ve heard of or maybe not, but we know when we encounter it that we’re *not* experts. This is the slice that gets really big and is guilty of making you feel like a fraud.
My own take on it is this: at any given point in your life, you’ve mastered a few things. Some of them were hard, and some of them weren’t. Some moments of mastery are memorable and important to you. But once you’re past it, you’ve “been there, done that” and it no longer seems momentous. Riding a bike, learning to swim – when you were a kid, it was probably a joyous moment when you first took off those training wheels and rode your bike unassisted. But after that, riding a bike was just routine. And then the next thing looms as a big challenge you’re not sure how to face (like driving a car), until in turn that, too, becomes routine.
Many things in our lives are like this, i think. Your green slice grows, but each thing in side of it may not seem like a big deal once attained. Meanwhile, the blue slice grows also, and probably at a greater rate. And thus, while you gain more knowledge, you also learn more about the world and what you don’t know, and it feels overwhelming, and so you are thus surprised when you receive accolades for something.
JangoSteve’s article says it a lot more thoroughly than i can, but i really liked the idea. Give it a read! I certainly thought it was nice to know that i’m not the only one that feels like a fraud sometimes!
The second maze (mapped out by the blue lines in the map above, trails totaling 2.7 miles) was much larger and more elaborate. It was much harder to navigate, too. We tried very hard not to cheat, which you could do by cutting through the corn. The maze was in pretty bad shape by this point in the season – the corn was totally dry and almost dead, and you could see where many impatient searchers had trampled between the paths. Not so for us, we insisted on finding ways around using the ‘real’ trails on the map. When we finally found all the checkpoints, we had two murderers with two murder weapons. We had to go back and find the checkpoint where we had messed up. It turns out that some of the clues had two sides, and someone had put the wrong side face-up at one checkpoint. Once we figured it out, we went to claim our prize (free popcorn) which neither of us wanted. We had a cold drink, though, and waited for sundown so we could complete the final maze – the haunted maze – which i was eagerly looking forward to.
