When I Stopped Trying to Look Smart

When I Stopped Trying to Look Smart

On experience, judgment, and the freedom to keep learning

There was a time when I believed that knowing the answer was one of the clearest signs of competence.

If someone made a mistake, I could explain what went wrong.

If someone asked a question, I wanted to have an answer.

And if I noticed something others had missed, I was often eager to point it out.

I thought I was helping.

Sometimes, I probably was.

But looking back, I have to acknowledge something less comfortable: sometimes I was also trying to demonstrate that I knew.

And those are not necessarily the same thing.

Knowing Is Not Understanding

Over the years, I have come to distinguish four things that I once treated almost interchangeably.

Information tells us what happened.

Knowledge helps us recognize patterns and remember what we have learned.

Understanding helps us explain why something happens.

Judgment helps us decide what to do with that understanding, including whether we should do anything at all.

They are related, but they are not interchangeable.

Someone can have considerable knowledge and still exercise poor judgment.

Someone can recognize a mistake without understanding the circumstances that produced it.

And someone can know the correct answer without recognizing that answering is not always the most helpful thing to do.

This distinction changed how I began to think about experience.

What Golf Taught Me About Other People’s Mistakes

Golf and baseball have something interesting in common.

Although both can be competitive, there is relatively little direct interaction with your opponents compared with many other sports.

You cannot make your opponent hit a bad golf shot.

You cannot improve your own swing by criticizing theirs.

In baseball, the interaction is more complex, particularly between pitcher and batter. But even there, recognizing someone else’s mistake does not automatically improve your own ability.

Someone else’s mistake doesn’t make me smarter.

It may give me information.

It may offer an opportunity to learn.

But the learning depends on what I do with that observation.

I can spend my time explaining why another player made a poor decision, or I can examine the decisions I would have made under similar circumstances.

The first may make me feel knowledgeable.

The second may actually help me improve.

And I have found that this distinction extends well beyond sports.

The Temptation to Be Right

In organizations, expertise is often rewarded through answers.

We promote people because they know how to solve problems.

We ask experienced employees to advise less experienced ones.

We expect leaders to make decisions, sometimes before they have had enough time to understand the situation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this.

Experience matters. Knowledge matters. Answers matter.

But an unintended consequence can emerge.

When people become accustomed to being valued for having answers, they may begin to feel uncomfortable without one.

A question becomes something to resolve quickly.

A disagreement becomes something to correct.

Someone else’s mistake becomes an opportunity to demonstrate expertise.

And gradually, the desire to be useful can become entangled with the desire to be right.

I recognize that tendency because I have experienced it myself.

Experience Is Evidence, Not a Law

One of the most valuable things experience gives us is a collection of situations we have already encountered.

We remember what worked.

We remember what failed.

We recognize similarities.

And sometimes we reach a conclusion before someone else has finished describing the problem.

That ability can be extremely useful.

But it also carries a risk.

What worked for us is not a law. It may only be a starting point.

A solution that succeeded in one organization may fail in another.

A practice that helped one team may create difficulties for another.

Even within the same organization, yesterday’s successful decision may not be appropriate tomorrow.

The circumstances may have changed.

The people may be different.

Or perhaps we never fully understood why the original solution worked.

Experience should make us more capable of recognizing possibilities, not less willing to investigate reality.

That is one of the reasons I value going to the Gemba.

Not because experience becomes irrelevant there, but because reality deserves the opportunity to challenge what experience has taught us.

Helping Without Taking Over

There is another dimension to this.

When someone is struggling, providing the answer may be the fastest way to resolve the immediate situation.

Sometimes that is exactly what is needed.

Safety, urgency, and the consequences of failure matter.

But when circumstances allow learning, the fastest answer is not always the most valuable contribution.

A question may help someone recognize what they had overlooked.

An observation may encourage them to reconsider an assumption.

And sometimes, allowing a person to think through a problem is more useful than demonstrating that we already know how to solve it.

This does not mean withholding knowledge.

It means using knowledge with a purpose.

The objective is not to make ourselves indispensable as the people who always have the answers.

It is to help others develop the ability to find answers without depending on us.

That requires something more than knowledge.

It requires judgment.

And sometimes, restraint.

The Freedom Not to Demonstrate Anything

I still enjoy learning something that others may not know.

I still appreciate a good explanation.

And I certainly have not stopped making judgments, including mistaken ones.

What has changed is my relationship with the need to demonstrate what I know.

I no longer believe every mistake needs my correction.

Every disagreement needs my argument.

Or every conversation needs my contribution.

Sometimes I can learn more by listening.

Sometimes someone else’s approach reveals a possibility I had not considered.

And sometimes the most useful thing I can do is recognize that I do not understand enough yet.

There is a particular freedom in that.

When I no longer need every conversation to confirm my competence, I can allow it to expand my understanding.

I can be curious without feeling threatened.

I can change my mind without treating it as a defeat.

And I can appreciate someone else’s knowledge without comparing it with my own.

Perhaps that is one of the less obvious benefits of experience.

Not that we eventually know enough to stop asking questions.

But that we become comfortable enough with what we know to keep asking them.

I used to think being smart meant having something to say.

Today, I am learning that judgment also means knowing when to listen.