Know your size

I'm all for not being afraid to suck at new things when times are good. But when being a pro is important, stay in your lane.

Know your size. This, with a few variations on the theme, is wisdom that comes from climbing, skiing and motorcycling — where knowing your size is a great advantage if you want to live to be old.

When I was spending a lot of time in Yosemite Valley (a magnet to people who don’t know their size) we used to observe, with a mixture of fascination and horror, groups of obviously inexperienced climbers throwing themselves, like kamikazes, at technically difficult and dangerous routes that were way over their heads (no pun intended). Rescues were far more common than they should have been. Deaths, too.

Knowing one’s size is a prescription, albeit an uncommon one, that applies beyond these activities. Not knowing one’s size used to be the hallmark of those suffering from Dunning-Kruger. That, I could handle. The problem is that these days not knowing one’s size seems to be a growing trend in the professional and expert ranks as well.

Most of the academics, doctors, scientists, lawyers and other professionals who constitute the expert class are experts in very specific areas. Professionals, though generally well-educated and often very bright, are actual experts in narrow realms. In physics alone, there are hundreds of sub disciplines with intense and narrow focus that are largely impenetrable to other physicists outside of those fields.

There’s a whimsical tale of Albert Einstein walking out of a conference while shaking his head in despair. When asked what was wrong, he replied, “I just listened to 10 talks and I only understood four of them.”

The joke is that no one else understood any of them. That’s the way that science often works.