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Expertise Quotes

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Expertise Quotes

“It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.”

“The older you get the more you realize that just because someone has an important job doesn't necessarily mean that they do it responsibly, or are even good at it. There are many 'D' students running around with high social status gained from their seemingly important positions. Integrity and proficiency are not a given. These qualities can only be proven over time.”

“. . as A martial arts teacher, we should never forget the first time we stepped onto the Dojo ground, remembering this, we will be better equipped to teach the next generation of Karate practitioners”

“Every man walks his own path, and every path has its fair share of locked doors. You never know who holds the key to a door you’ll need to open one day, so you best treat people as if they are all keyholders.”

“He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit.”

“Authenticity and respect go to those who stick to their own specific field of work. For example, I am a Biologist and my work is the understanding of human nature - that's where I place all my attention. I know nothing revelatory about modern physics - I know nothing revelatory about mathematics - I know nothing revelatory about architecture - I know nothing revelatory about any field of understanding except for the ones directly related to biology. It doesn't mean that I cannot learn about other fields - I can, but every human has his or her own distinct knack, and mine is understanding humans - understanding how and why they think, what they think - how and why they feel, what they feel - how and why they behave, the way they behave - how and why they perceive, what they perceive.”

“Marketing is so powerful that it can make even an extremely untalented musician a one-hundred-hits wonder.”

“When a domain reaches a point where the knowledge for skillful professional practice cannot be acquired in a decade, more or less, then several adaptive developments are likely to occur. Specialization will usually increase (as it has, for example, in medicine), and practitioners will make increasing use of books and other external reference aids in their work. Architecture is a good example of a domain where much of the information a professional requires is stored in reference works, such as catalogues of available building materials, equipment, and components, and official building codes. No architect expects to keep all of this in his head or to design without frequent resort to these information sources. In fact architecture can almost be taken as a prototype for the process of design in a semantically rich task domain. The emerging design is itself incorporated in a set of external memory structures: sketches, floor plans, drawings of utility systems, and so on. At each stage in the design process, partial design reflected in these documents serves as a major stimulus suggesting to the designer what he should attend to next. This direction to new sub-goals permits in turn new information to be extracted from memory and reference sources and another step to be taken toward the development of the design.”

“No tricks, no tools, but talent makes a task truly top class.”

“In a now-famous experiment, he and his colleagues compared three groups of expert violinists at the elite Music Academy in West Berlin. The researchers asked the professors to divide the students into three groups: the “best violinists,” who had the potential for careers as international soloists; the “good violinists”; and a third group training to be violin teachers rather than performers. Then they interviewed the musicians and asked them to keep detailed diaries of their time. They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week— participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done. Ericsson and his cohorts found similar effects of solitude when they studied other kinds of expert performers. “Serious study alone” is the strongest predictor of skill for tournament-rated chess players, for example; grandmasters typically spend a whopping five thousand hours—almost five times as many hours as intermediatelevel players—studying the game by themselves during their first ten years of learning to play. College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice. What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” To see Deliberate Practice in action, we need look no further than the story of Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrew meeting was the catalyst that inspired him to build that first PC, but the knowledge base and work habits that made it possible came from another place entirely: Woz had deliberately practiced engineering ever since he was a little kid. (Ericsson says that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice to gain true expertise, so it helps to start young.)”

“When we feel insecure, why do we allow ourselves to forget our expertise? You know what you know, and you can carry those skills no matter where you go, into uncomfortable terrain. Limits are removed, results are open, and failure ceases to exist.”

“…as she cycled home Shelley reflected that in all her years at Birnam Wood she had never quite mastered the skill of knowing in every individual circumstance whether to overplay or underplay her expertise. It was something that Mira seemed to know instinctively—that a demonstrated competency reassured some people and aggravated others; she could pitch herself at exactly the right point between whimsical amateur and winsome entrepreneur, a performance that, when Shelley tried it, only seemed to make it much less likely that the person she was talking to would want to give her things for free.”

“Sonnet 1106 When an expert doesn't know something, They say, "I don't know", without tricks. But an armchair intellectual knows it all, Tiktok and Insta are their clinics. An expert's worth remains the same, with or without Tiktok and Insta. Armchair intellectuals are here today gone tomorrow, with the tiniest algorithm change of social media. My work will continue, with or without social media. My work will continue, with or without internet. My work will continue, with or without electricity even, so will the work of every expert sapiens. Instant popularity vanishes just as instantly, Today you are relevant, tomorrow you are gone. Make a real contribution that isn't overshadowed by the next big tech revolution.”