Stay aware, Experts!

I just read an interesting article in Flying magazine that looks at the art of flying through the lens of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. The article is titled What Makes an Expert? by Jay Hopkins.

The point of the article is that just because you have 10,000 hours of experience, does that really make you an expert? What about the Sunday afternoon pilot who only flys one airplane in nice weather in daylight, vs. the adventerous pilot who flies many kinds of airplanes in many kinds of weather conditions day or night? One pilot has flown one hour 10,000 times, and the other pilot has flown 10,000 very different hours.

Jay references an accident where two pilots flew into the side of a mountain in a brand new Cessna 182T on a clear night. Each pilot had over 25,000 hours, giving a combined 53,000 hours of flight experience. Each pilot had a wealth of different kinds of flying experience, from military to airline to everything in between. However, one pilot had 75 hours behind the new Garmin G-1000 flight panel and the other pilot had no experience at all. Jay pondered that these two pilots were so wrapped up in the relatively new environment, that they may have forgotten to turn on the terrain display and ran into the granite.

Does this mean that they need an additional 10,000 hours behind the new glass cockpits to be considered experts?

Let’s look at it from a different perspective. If you are an expert in your field, with over 10,000 hours, and it’s a relatively stable area of expertise, then I think we could all agree that the measurement of expertise is linear. However, what if you are in a rapidly changing field? Or a field in which the rules of the game are changing rapidly? Does 10,000 hours of marketing experience make you a marketing expert? Have you marketed one hour 10,000 times, or have you experienced a wealth of different experiences? I’d say that Seth Godin’s cummulative hours are a hell of a lot more jam packed with experience than the rest of our experiences.

Who is an expert on the proper application of Twitter? Are you a disruptive technology expert? How do you measure something that no one person has yet accumulted 10,000 hours.

Are you about to fly into a mountain because you are too focused on learning a new technology or concept while thinking you are an expert? Many experienced folks, myself included, have crashed into the side of mountains because of resting on their laurels, or getting too wrapped up in applying something new while missing focus on the big picture.

At the point that you branch out into something new, are you no longer an expert?

Always look through the lens of a beginner and don’t get too comfortable that your 10,000 hours makes you an expert, because if you get too comfortable, you might become a casualty, career wise or physically.