We've talked a lot about what authority is. Now we'll take a look at how you can establish it for yourself.
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We put a lot of emphasis on the expert, but what about the novice? It's possible that being a newbie is at least as important as being a grand master. Today we take a look at the novice, in all his or her splendor, and look closer at the sliding scale of ignorance and expertise.
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So the argument is that expertise isn't subjective or relative—it's really about having a "deep knowledge" of a subject.
But what does "deep knowledge" mean? How do we quantify and measure that? How do we create something objective and measurable if we only have tools that are subjective and relative?
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An autonomous expert doesn't need you to validate them. They have their knowledge and their work, and that's all they require. They're an expert whether you know it or agree with it or not. An attributed expert, on the other hand, needs to be recognized by someone for their expertise. They have to be persuasive and they have to be able to communicate what they know.
These two aren't mutually exclusive. They overlap. And in this post, we take a look at the nature of autonomous and attributed expertise, and how each effects our decision making.
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Whenever we are learning something new, there's a veritable symphony of activity going on in our brains. Each new bit of information we encode into memory forms new neurons and pathways in our brains, and those tendrils reach outward in fractal patterns, trying their best to grow big and bright.
In this post, we're exploring how experts encode information faster than novices, simply because of the amount of information they already have.
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Is there such a thing as too much expertise? Can your credibility make you even more liable if your insight goes in the wrong direction? Today we're looking at the consequences of an expert's testimony when he turns out to be wrong.
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Expertise and authority can make you pretty powerful. Doctors and lawyers are a good example of that. But with that power comes a great responsibility (thanks Spider-man!). So what happens when we leverage the power but ditch the responsibility?
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So maybe you're a subject matter expert. But does that automatically mean you can teach someone else what you know? In Part 3 of Questioning Authority, let's look at the idea of the "expert blindspot," and how knowing something and teaching something are often two different somethings.
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You know what you know, right? But do you know what you don't know? How confident are you in determining your own level of expertise and authority on a subject? In this post we take a look at the Dunning-Kruger effect, and how it impacts our estimation of our own competency and level of skill.
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I'm a writer. I know, I know ... shocker. But there are nuances to being a writer that some people never consider.
For starters, a writer often has to quickly make him or herself an "authority" on a topic, using source material to gain an inside perspective, to write about it in a way that resonates with and conveys meaning to the reader. We become "on the fly experts." It's part of the job.
And that's a job I've done since I was very young. I've made a career of it. I teach other people to do it, and to get better at it, to leverage that ability to build or improve their business and their lives. It's a core belief—something I don't question. And yet, recently I've been challenged on that belief, and it has me thinking.
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