Early this year, I had a dental appointment for a teeth cleaning. The hygienist was out sick, so the dentist did the cleaning himself. Before he started, he told me “I just want you to know I’ve done a lot of cleanings, but I’m probably not going to be as graceful as the hygienists who do this every single day.
Dear reader, he was correct in his statement.
It wasn’t horrible, but it was clear this was no longer part of his expert skill set. And it reminded me of what it feels like when I have to go into a Sketch file and navigate, or even when I’m in Omnigraffle trying to block out a wireframe. Bottom line, I suck at it. This isn’t false modesty; I’m really bad. I get frustrated, because there was a time when this type of work was my bread-and-butter, and I was fast and efficient with these tools.
BUT. This doesn’t mean I’m bad at my job; these skills, which served me well in the past, simply aren’t regular requirements for my current role. As I focus on developing new skills for different demands, I start to get rusty on some of the skills that got me here. Basically, I lose expert (often even “competent”) status on those skills, and that’s not only OK, that’s the system working as designed. Evolving means becoming an expert in different things. And being an expert at something means actively practicing it.
It also means that there are people in different stages of their career, often at much earlier stages, that are much more skilled at parts of a project than I am now (no matter how skilled I once was). And even importantly, it means that if I am truly growing, I will constantly become a beginner, both at things I once knew well as well as the new skills I am trying to develop.
In his book Finish, John Acuff says “to be good at one thing, you have to be bad at something else.” A lot of career growth is about figuring out what things you are willing to let go of in order to grab onto something new. I don’t care how smart you think you are, you cannot be good at everything; something will always suffer if you don’t prioritize. That means growth is about getting comfortable with being a beginner over and over and over again, in order to become an expert over and over and over again.
No matter where you are in your career, you can (and I would argue, you should) exist in a space where you are both an expert and beginner, both teacher and student, all at the same time.
(based on a twitter thread)
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