It was one of Seth Godin’s posts that kicked this thought chain off. I’m a regular follower of his blog, and normally I nod sagely at his wisdom, but for once I’m shaking my head furiously. Why? Because of the wikipedia gap. I’m thinking of it more as a chasm.

I have recently restarted academic studies and it has definitely been a shock to the system. The rigor and discipline required has reminded me quite how sloppy we are as a society when it comes to matters of knowledge and understanding. More simply put, we are rubbish at getting our facts straight and the writers we read are poor at acknowledging their sources.

One of the keys to effective leadership and successful living is summarised in this:”What’s the reality of the situation?” Start with this question, and work from there. It is a simple question, but often a very hard one to answer, accurately. Understanding the reality of the situation means sifting facts from opinions, truths from assertions and understanding from misunderstanding (see Understanding the reality of the situation Part I and Part II).

This is where I have a problem with wikipedia. I have expertise in a few areas and I know that the information on those areas in wikipedia is inaccurate, if not just plain wrong. While the pages sometimes note that the information is unvalidated or contentious, unfortunately that doesn’t stop people taking it as fact. Remember, when it comes to your brain, just like a computer: garbage in, garbage out. Once your put junk in there, it is very hard to get it out. Why have I not edited these inaccuracies? Because I know enough to know that I don’t know enough to fix them properly. Don’t get me wrong, I really like wikipedia, it can be a great starting point, it just isn’t an authoritative source on its own.

Back to Seth’s post, I believe we should be teaching children basic philosophy and critical thinking – and some research at least agrees (see: “a little bit of philosophy makes you smart, apparently“). Information should be multi-sourced and children should be encouraged to explore different perspectives and assess the information. We should do the same as adults too. Check the sources – too often we hear the same misinformation from multiple places, little realizing that the same inaccurate facts are being parroted or dressed up in new clothes as new information. Misunderstanding reality, be it academic or misunderstanding ourselves, stands in the way of good leadership and living. Inaccurate information means inaccurate decisions. It is worth fighting to establish the truth in your life, sadly it doesn’t just jump off of a web page. What are your real goals? What is really happening around you? What untruths have, or are, holding you back?

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I have been flattening the battery of my iPod listening to the title track from Stevie Wonder’s new album, A Time 2 Love. It is a wonderful song, featuring India.Arie, with potent lyrics about the things that we find time for, and the important things that we don’t. It started me thinking that making time for things is a key skill for success and happiness.

• Making time to rest.
• Making time to prepare.
• Making time to practice.
• Making time to learn.
• Making time to reflect.
• Making time to love.

I’ve been getting a little rest myself these last few days, as there has been lots going off It is a fun time for the blog, which recently made it on to the WordPress Growing Blogs list and was mentioned as Daily PlanIt’s Discovery of the day (thank you!).

I’m thinking about what next for the blog. It has been in action for over half a year, and I have learned many things. The blog has been a kind of journal, and that is a good thing.

I want to write much more about presenting with PowerPoint, one of my major passions, and I know that I have been writing less about productivity of late. That isn’t to say I have cracked the productivity problems of life, just that I am doing more doing. I am also about to start studying for the first time in a long time, as I formalize my Psychology learning. A long way of saying, expect more on those things, but I am not sure if it will be one blog or three just yet.

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I’ve written about learning before, but in musing about the ‘mastery’ of a skill or profession, something came back to me. It was something that I heard in the days when I was heavily into music production, desperately trying to get ‘that sound’. A wise old professional at the time said to me “there are three steps to mastery.”

1. Know the rules

In the first stage you learn the rules. You learn what works and what doesn’t. Discovering when to apply certain techniques and processes.

2. Know when to break the rules

In the second stage you learn when to break those sames rules. As a musician, you learn when to do something that shouldn’t work, but does. As a photographer, you know to ignore a certain general rule about lighting in a specific situation. And so it goes on. You reach a level of experience that means you don’t just know the rules, you know the exceptions to the rules.

3. Make the rules

In the final stage, you make the rules. You create exceptional new techniques that others then follow. This is when you have become a master.

Be a Master!

With dedication and determination you can be a master. Study the leaders, see how they do it – learn their tricks. Then apply your own individual character to create unique ways of doing things. Eventually you’ll be the one that others are studying.

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A mad, but good week so far. I’ve done some new things this week and have been helping some other people learn too. That started me thinking about the learning process and the stages on the way to becoming competent at something, learning about learning…

The day before yesterday, I headed out to the train station to catch a train, for the first time in a long while. As I approached the station I saw a huge queue at the ticket counter. No problem. There were also two ticket machines outside, right by the equally huge queue by the taxis. So I walked up to one of the machines, selected my ticket and went to pay. The machine spits out my card, with a no-can-do-message. The man at the machine next to me says, “The machine’s broken, and that’s the queue” and nods in a general direction. OK, so the machine’s broken, I already know where the queue for the ticket office is. I go to use the second ticket machine. As I feel eyes burning in my back, suddenly the penny dropped. When he said “that’s the queue” he was nodding towards the queue for the taxis. That queue was actually the queue for the working ticket machine. Safe to say, I shamefully went back and queued up, I am british after all. I duly missed my train as I waited to buy the ticket. You live, you learn.

There are distinct phases in developing a new skill. We start as incompetent, but unaware of our incompetence. That is unconscious incompetence. We don’t know that we don’t know and we are comfortable with our ignorance. Then something happens to surface our incompetence. Someone says something to us or we receive feedback via some mechanism. At that point we either give up, or we start to work on aquiring that new skill. We are now incompetent, but consciously so. As we learn, we become consciously competent. As we go on to gain repeated experience, we become increasingly unconscious of our competence. Finally, we end up unconsciously competent. I’ve heard this sort of model talked about, but never seen it documented anywhere. I’d be very interested to read any research that might exist on it.

There are some key takeaways from this model:

1. When we are incompetent, we don’t know that we are until we receive feedback. Solicit feedback!
2. We feel the most incompetent just before we become competent. Press on through. This isn’t the time to give up, even though it feels like you want to.
3. You’ve finally mastered something when you don’t realise how good you are. There again, you may have just slipped back into unconscious incompetence.

Awareness of the process is a great aid in learning new skills. Don’t worry if someone makes you feel a bit of an idiot, they may just have put you on the first step to becoming less of one. When you feel like you are useless at it, don’t give up. You know what happens next? You are just about to get good! All it takes is a little bit more practice.

See Also: The 3 Stages of Mastery

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