People who truly excel at what they do, make things look easy. These experts seem to take their time.
When someone has reached a state of mastery, they have accumulated a vast store of knowledge and experience in their working memory. When they start to work, they don’t need to look things up. Because of this, they don’t feel rushed to act. They have time to orient to the problem or task, and before they act, they will have scanned their working memory for the information they need.
When approaching a problem, the expert will approach the task with curiosity and they will take their time and orient to the situation, getting to know the problem before they act. Novices, on the other hand, will jump in quickly, getting to work on the problem before they really understand what they’re dealing with.
The novices miss the vast store of accumulated knowledge in their working memory. It takes a long time of deliberate practice to acquire such knowledge. Therefore, the novice should do the next best thing, when faced with a problem: be patient, do some research, ask advice, and find the information and the understanding that we need, before we act.
A true expert will quickly scan through their internal working memory before taking action, but they will still take their time, orienting completely and with abundant curiosity to the problem before diving in. When we’re not yet an expert, we need to take even more time to learn what we need to know before acting. This will be slower and less reliable. To get the best results, spend extra time learning and orienting to the problem first.
As a novice, we will experience more failures because not only do we not know a lot but we also don’t yet know what we don’t know. Getting comfortable with making mistakes and experiencing failure is essential to gaining the expertise we need over time.
Knowledge from failure sticks around for a long time. But there is a tendency to ignore failure or try not to focus on it. Instead, we should be treating failure as a learning opportunity. Any great innovation or accomplishment is dependent on how strong we are in facing failure, learning from it and solving the new problems that it presents. This takes emotional resilience, and emotional resilience takes practice.
Every problem is an opportunity to learn and every setback is an opportunity to grow. With each failure, we have the opportunity to gain much more understanding than we would if we were always successful. Taking the time to enjoy the process of learning that every new problem brings is the most resilient and effective stance from which to gain greater expertise.
Sven Franssen