 Hello everybody. Now I feel kind of bad, I don't actually have a way for you to get rich. Work hard, start saving when you're young, don't have kids, steal. It's really not part of the program. Hi, it's been a long, fun day, huh? Not a lot of smart people up talking, now it's loud, my goodness, I'm very sorry. It's been a good day, I've been having a good time here. I flew in late at night, I was taken to a hotel, this Hilton Garden, Don't Be Creepy, and then I came here, and then I think I'm going to go back to that, so I really haven't gotten the full feel of the Waltham experienced yet, but the Waltham experience, am I pronouncing that right, experience, I had some of your famous steak fries and coffee with milk. They call that the full Waltham, but that's not what you're here for. I'm sorry, calling people, hi, so sorry, so sorry. You know what, I totally had the world's cheapest Uber ride today, $6, boom. Anyway, they're going to move, they're making the Waltham move, they call it, that's trademark. Thanks for coming out today. I don't love this title, I'll probably change it after this, but I need it somewhere to start. Earlier today, I don't know if you're here in the very, very early morning, Ken, kicked things off, and he says something really cool that I like the lot, I like this so much, I wrote it on a piece of paper, I did forget a comma, John Siracusa, but earlier today Ken said, if you're good, today will make you better, and I thought that was a pretty good statement, because why do people come to things like this? Well, you want to get free food and shirts and ski ball and stuff, but there's also something kind of special about getting a day off work. You guys don't work, come on, this economy. But the coolest thing is, and I swear to God, seeing this at all different kinds of collections of different kinds of geeks and nerds, one thing is always the same. I'm not going to make any jokes. It's nice to be around people who do what you do, it's nice to be around people who struggle with the same problems that you've struggled with, and it's nice to be around people who are a little smarter than you. Now, I'm fortunate enough to get that a lot. It's nice to be, I'm constantly being reminded how much smarter people are around me, but there's something special about being in proximity to people who are better at your job than you are, and I think it's, I'll say it, unique, to have the experience of being around people who are great at what they do. Because the goal today, like Ken said, is to get better. And I have such a hard time getting better at things. I find it very difficult to do. I think a lot of people struggle with it for a long time. How do you get better at doing a thing? When you get better at doing the thing, how do you know if you're getting better at the right thing? When do you know it's time to go do another thing? How do you avoid becoming the world's greatest master of something that nobody really cares about anymore? He wondered aloud in Massachusetts. I think about it a lot. And it's something that my friend, Sean, indicating, hi, Sean, and I've been talking about for like two or three years now, is just how it is when you do some kind of crazy work involving ideas and numbers and programs and all of these really elusive things. How to know if you're concentrating on the right sorts of things. How to know if you're getting better. And then that really difficult leap of just knowing, like, am I in the right place? You know, is my ladder against the right wall, as they say? So I thought about this a lot. I came up with this in a hotel room in Waltham, Massachusetts the other night. I think I've tried to distill the difficulty down to this one pithy statement. It's hard to know what you'll need to know in order to know what you'll need to know. Come on, that makes almost no sense. That's like, that's the guy with the baseball. That's almost like a Yogi Berra. That's like pretty good. That's sports ball, right? It's hard to know what you'll need to know in order to know what you'll need to know. A kind of co-on, to be sure. But I find that to be really true. And I find that once I realize how much I know about a thing, and once I realize how super good I am at it, it's probably too late. It's often something no one cares about anymore. Or I find myself becoming the master of something really, really stupid. And I don't discover until it's entirely too late that I should have been mastering something that everybody else started working on two years ago. Never happened to you, though, right? You're totally up to date. I used to be the master of something. A lot of you, some of you do things with computers, right? Engineers and whatnot. I know how to work a room. Not many of you know this, but I'm a seasoned technologist. I've been working in technology for a very long time. For me, that started in the early 1990s when I moved to Tallahassee, Florida. Tallahassee has a lot to recommend it. It's a very warm climate, except for when it's not. Probably in Tallahassee, just best known as having the most phallic capital in the United States. That is unre-touched, if you know what I mean. I think I'll start over. So I went to this Squirrely liberal arts school in this more southern part of Florida, down toward the underside of the Wang, and I studied liberal arts. Come on, grow up. I was a liberal artist, which means I learned about things like literature and philosophy. Never had a single science or math class. And then I had to go find a job. And the funny part was, when I went to that Squirrely school, I ended up getting a bunch of really nonsensical dumb skills that had very little to do with Kierkegaard, or did it? I've been funny if it was Foucault. Anyway, the point is, I had these weird skills, and I don't know where I got them. I could tell you things, like how many syllables are in this thing or that. But the crazy part was, I went to put out a really dumb literature journal, and it was dumb. But in order to put that out, I had to learn how to use PageMaker. Give it up. That was my deep dive, that was my plunge into the world of technology. I was going from being somebody who wrote papers about Kurt Vonnegut to having to learn how to use this layout program. And the crazy thing was, all of a sudden, that I started really liking the Mac. And this and that's strange. I learned about fonts, and I learned about canvas, and I learned about all of these things. And I somehow managed to bluff my way into this job in Tallahassee, where I was ostensibly a line editor. I eventually started doing more and more graphics, and I eventually started doing courtroom exhibits, which is awesome, because you get to make lots of exaggerations and use a color printer. Can't say about every job in the 90s. So this exposed me to many things, like the cost of electronic inks. And so I learned stuff. I had to learn how to get the files from one place. Do you guys remember having a job in the 90s, where a thing wasn't really a thing until you printed it? Do you remember that? I think that's a funny thing about a lot of you, you millennials, as they say. You guys are used to a time where really mostly what you make is something electronic that's a file. The places I've worked in the past, nothing was really real until it was an actual product. And that countered if it was something that you got to print out. But it was kind of a weird coitus interruption, if you didn't actually have anything to hold in your hand and stuff into a FedEx package, and you'd feel like less of a man. It was in the 90s. It's how we did it. But I had to learn things like how to do file transfers. I know it gets worse, believe me. I had to learn all of this stuff. Suddenly, there was very foreign to me, like how to do files, transfers, and use the haze modem. And a funny thing happened at the same time, which was I was introduced to the internet. This is the internet as it arrived in 1993. There's a box that you would pass into and breathe very deeply, and you could use Telnet, and Gopher, and Archie, and Veronica, and it was a revelation. And you know what I discovered after about a day is you could send and receive a lot more than court exhibits. You could receive many things that other people had put on the internet. You could talk to people in the Gopher holes, and then I discovered the AOL, and I just covered the copy-serve, and then I got fired from the job for downloading too many pictures of Betty Page, which is what we in the business call an occupational hazard. Now, I know how to make courtroom exhibits. I know how to send them with a haze modem. I know how to get fired for Betty Page. But now I'm well and truly screwed, because all of that crap that I had cobbled together into that kind of weird half-a-job in Tallahassee was gone, and I had no idea what to do with myself. And so you can guess what happened. I decided to take it onto the web. So starting in about 1995, never has the word professional been used so poorly as it is now. I professionally made web pages starting in 1995, which primarily consisted of telling people what the web was, and then suggesting they give you $50 to make something for it. And that was pretty much the job. But I got really good at it, because here's the thing. Anybody here making web pages in the mid-90s? Some of you, your grandparents, maybe? Anybody remember? You were a wizard if you could do that. You could open up front page and make a thing go here, and then people seep zoop. Somehow that goes onto the interweb. What the hell? And I turned that into a very small, mostly unsuccessful profession as a seasoned technologist. I became a web guy. Now this is ostensibly for engineers and web development types, right? Some of you guys, web? Two, three, four? I'll share with you a few of my successes. I had to go back to archive.org for some of these. This was a high watermark for me. A trade show site I did for PC Expo, back in 1999. Some of the things I pioneered, I think this was my idea to have things be transparent, so stuff would show through. Affordances, doubtless, many of you are stroking your beard and asking, oh, Jesus, how did he get Expo to be slanty? I. Perhaps I will be best remembered as the guy who would always have two links to everything, because if you didn't understand that this was a link because you turned off underlining, you could also see the word go. Boom. Made aside for my band, it was pretty exciting for the time. It had a background and a monkey. We had Shockwave, which I hope somebody has updated because this is the kind of crap that I did for a job. And then I got hired by I.com. And they brought me to San Francisco because of these massive skills that I had. Now, honestly, that's not that bad of a web page for 1999. This is JavaScript. When you pull that, stuff happens. I don't want to overwhelm you guys. I know you're probably already feeling kind of bad about my stuff I've done. Let me boil this down to you. In Tallahassee, Florida, in the mid to late 90s, I had a career because of the break tag. I knew how to use this to make letters go down here. Almost no one else knew how to do that. All the chiropractors, all the musicians, all the people who had much better uses of their time than break tags and Betty Page found in me a friend who for the sum of $50 could get them onto the internet. See, my sense is a lot of people picked up web stuff through this kind of hacking, copying and pasting code. Anybody else just kind of picked this stuff up? 90s, 2000s, millennials? I made a pretty good career out of that for a really long time. I mean, in web terms, my god, it was practically like a millennium. But now, we've got this. It seems to me, this has only really dawned on me in the last couple of years, that pretty much everything I have ever, ever, ever known how to do on the web can now be accomplished with one line of code in any of a variety of different frameworks. OK? And I don't bug you about paying me. I don't forget to close a tag. I don't do any of the dumb stuff that I did every single day when I was a web developer in Florida. I'm so not kidding. Basically, everything that made me unique with the possible exception of knowing how to paste graphics into things. That's pretty much my entire career. I know there are other ways to do this. There are other things. You got your less and stuff like that. My gosh, I'm just going to guess less does a pretty good job on CSS better than I do. But I learned an important lesson. Be very careful if you have a job where you can be replaced by a shell script. I'll extend that a little bit. Be careful of any job where you can be replaced by a robot or a monkey or a shell script, especially a monkey that knows how to run shell scripts. OK, this is not going to sound as crazy to you, because you're not a crazy old man like I am. But from not even knowing what the internet is to having a job using something called the internet no one ever heard of, that was two years from me. Two years from nobody's ever heard of this to now I've got a job doing this. Five years from that to working at a .com, a few years after that to doing project management and web stuff. But does this mirror anybody's weird career? Maybe I'm not the only one who has found themselves having to learn how to make a lot of the hats that they were going to be wearing in the next few years. But I think it's happening a lot. I think it's happening fast. I don't think I know anybody, hardly, who isn't either in the military or maybe in academics, who's had anything approaching the same job for 10 years. Even those people who have those same jobs, their job has changed tremendously. Think about just about any job that you can think of. That person hasn't had to learn so much more. I mean, you can just learn how to use your phone when you're a plumber. There's all new stuff to learn. Is this a new problem? I don't think it's a new problem, but I think it's a very attenuated problem that is curiously contemporary. As an example, I like to use to try and just contrast this a little bit. That's my late grandfather, Barry Watson. My grandfather came to the United States in the early 1930s. I think he snuck his way in on some kind of an education visa. That didn't happen. No dental school for grandpa. He got a job at Cincinnati Gas and Electric, a union job. He started there in the early 30s. He had that same job until he retired in 1966. So he got a job, circa 1931. Roosevelt, other guys, boom, Beatles, grandpa retires. By the way, that's Lamb Shop. That's his dog. They're both deceased, don't worry. He's a Shriner. He had a great burial. My grandpa was in a funny position because my grandpa had what I like to call a Richard's scary job. I don't know if you're a kid, you have kids, or you ever were a kid, but there's something kind of special about Richard's scary books. Because first of all, they're horrifying. Second, they're kind of politically incorrect. But there's something wonderful about these books. These are designed for little kids to learn how the world works and how hegemony takes over everything. And the nice thing about everybody who's got a job is they've got four things. So you've got the traffic officer, you've got the letter carrier, you've got the person being tied up in a hose. But every time you see somebody and they're describing what their job is, notice there's four things. I've got pretty much everybody. That little creature has a uniform. They've got a hat. They've got a tool of some kind. You can tell what they do. What's the fourth one? It's got the name of their job right down here. You can tell what their job is. That's a traffic officer. Do you see any interaction designers in this one? Any github jockeys? Because I think the Richard Scarry book for our time would be rows and rows and rows of furry little animals wearing headphones and typing on Macs. And you'd wander in, you'd say, I wonder, are any of these creatures good at their job? I can't tell. What do they do? They certainly are sweet and like to be tied up in hoses. It's his book. Whatever happened to you, you ever go home, you're a visual relative, so I hope not. You ever go home, you go to Thanksgiving and, you know, and Janice is there and she wonders how you're doing. How are you? You say, oh, I'm an interaction designer. She says, oh, that's good. Are things okay? Is everything all right? My grandfather had a job that could be described in one sentence. If he went to one of those cocktail parties that was really, really loud and everybody was drinking and smoking like he liked to do, he could yell his job in one sentence and there would be no question at all what he did. I turn off people's electricity when they don't pay their bill. And he had that job for almost 35 years. He probably got better different jackets and a better truck and maybe his hair got a little longer in the late 50s, but the point is it was exactly the same job for that entire time. So unlike you and me, mostly, how much do you think grandpa had to learn in order to keep his cushy union job? Did he have to go subscribe to a bunch of journals and look at Usenet to figure out what's going on in the world of turning off electricity? Beep boop, off dot turn off electricity. Comp, I think not. I think his job probably pretty much ran itself. I think as long as he didn't show up drunk and set shit on fire, I think he was gold. He retired to Florida with a goddamn poodle. Same job 30 years. But there's more, there's more to this. Think about where you work, think about who you work with. This is my, I wasn't there, it was before I was born, organization structure for where my grandfather worked. Could I, excuse me, could I please talk to the slide a minute here? This middle section is my grandfather. He had a boss, whose name was boss. And then under my grandfather were the people whose electric he shut off. Any questions? Oh, Barry Watson, let's figure out some new metrics for how you're doing. Did you shut off more electricity today? Yep, booyah. Boss, he's called. And I came in a little early today and I went and I looked up the orchard for where each of you works. And it's a little more complex. I would like to find the smart ass who invented the dotted line. This solid line I get. That's the person you have to really pretend like you like and respect. The dotted lines are super confusing. You probably are disappointing people right now that you haven't even met yet. Are you aware of this? Are you aware of all the disappointment that's going on out there? You should be aware, there's a lot of disappointment. So not only, so my grandfather shows up. He gets the truck, he gets the thing, he gets the pension. He gets to just hang out and do his shutting off electricity job. But we're different, right? Because we gotta keep figuring out what this job is every day, whatever this job is. You show up. Oh, and then by the way, real quick, you also have to manage all of your relationships with all the other people in your group. Oh, and by the way, if it doesn't work out, you're gonna have to figure out what comes next. And I couldn't even begin to tell you what that is because in six weeks, it's gonna be something else. I think, so that's the good news. That's the exciting news. Because this is knowledge work and boy do I ever have soft hands, thank the Lord. You get to go to lunch when you want, you get to sit in air conditioning and nobody has ever gotten black lung from Excel. What is knowledge work? Look at this handsome fella. Oh my goodness. Peter Drucker says knowledge work, paraphrase by Merlin, is that it's the ability to take something, add value to information. No, you're not making this one dingus. You're part of the process, the intellectual process that gets to making that dingus made. So back in the 90s, when we were able to finally print something out and put it in the FedEx envelope and send it, that was still pretty abstract. It isn't like I got to make a snuggie and wrap it up and hand it to somebody. I had a small role in that process. How often can you even point people to the website you worked on and say, oh, I made sure that that line's blue? Not that often. It's very collaborative, it's very abstract, and it's very, very hard to understand. You're pretty much on your own. That's the thing. That's the beauty and the pain of knowledge work. Nobody? Is the extent to which you are on your own. How do you get better at that? Are you getting my question from earlier? How do you even know what to get better at? Does anybody else ever find that challenging? I find it really challenging. And I think a lot of the times that I have not found it challenging is because I was moving in the wrong direction or I wasn't moving at all. I'm not trying to be inspirational for the love of God. All I'm trying to say is I think it's a super interesting problem that people try to solve for a really long time. How do you get better at something? I think it's really, really elusive. Fortunately, I have one man who shares my obsession. For some time now, something like about three years. I've been visiting with one man. One very handsome man. Who shares my interest in how people get better at stuff and why it is so gosh darn hard to understand. And I think we probably both learned about this in the pragmatic thinking book. Something we both learned about is this idea called the dry fist model of skill acquisition. And now it's gonna get real dry and slow. No, I don't understand it, so I'll gloss over it. But basically, around the time Disco was dying, the Air Force came to these two brothers at Berkeley who bear and stewart dry fist and said, wow, it's really hard to understand how people get good at stuff. You think you could help us out with it. And so they brought them in to do it. Making what I think must be one of the coolest looking reports of all time and pull this up. How cool, wouldn't you love to make stuff that looks like that? So they came up with a five stage model of the mental activities involved in directed skill acquisition. This is something that a lot of people have found extremely interesting over the time. I have expanded on taking in many different directions. Some people have argued about it. I'm gonna give you the super dumb Merlin Man version of this, which I hope you'll find almost as compelling as I have found it. If you're really worried, you can go through and go to Google Images, and there's stuff you can look up here. Roughly five stages. How do we get better? How do we go from zero to something? You start out by being a novice. We know what a novice is. A novice is somebody who doesn't know a lot of stuff about stuff. Somebody who can learn and follow rules, but does not have the experience that you would need to make contextual decisions about how to do stuff. You know a novice. My personal favorite. The most dangerous of men. The craziest of characters. The one you really don't wanna trust on Friday night after everyone's gone home. The advanced beginner. This is the one who's really learned some stuff. This is all the experts on Reddit. The advanced beginner, this is mine, this is not there. The advanced beginner to me is somebody who has managed to not fail colossally at least once. Doesn't mean they've succeeded. It just means they haven't died in a fire yet. The advanced beginner knows stuff about stuff. You've actually become competent. You develop more situational awareness. The ability to start more intuitively understanding what kind of rules should go in this situation and not that situation. And gosh, isn't that hard to explain sometimes? It's hard to understand, let alone explain. Why is that? Why is it that sometimes this works this way and sometimes that works that way? When you get competent though, that's the point that gets interesting. If you're poor bastard, if you make it out of being an advanced beginner. But at whatever you're doing when you become competent, you're starting to, the way I would look at it, you're not only starting to succeed more often, you're starting to fail in more interesting and insightful ways. I'd beware of anybody who tries to sell their expertise to you based on how seldom they failed. I think that is a really crummy metric for success. I wanna meet somebody who's failed 1,000 times in the most bonkers ways ever that they can help me avoid. That's what to grow on. Then you move up to proficient, it gets kinda boring for a while. Then eventually you become an expert. The expert is super interesting because the expert has the weirdest kind of cataract ever. The expert has solved and failed to solve so many different kinds of problems in so many different contexts. They are officially qualified for a wizard hat. They understand how stuff works and they understand which rules should apply where. If you wanted to really dumb this down, at the bottom you start out following rules and if everything goes well and the Disney magic smiles your way, you eventually move up to intuition. Does that make some sense? You remember when you very first learned how to boil soup? Did you call yourself a chef? Not really. But eventually, people like my sister-in-law who's an amazing chef, she can do stuff like walk into a kitchen and just based on leftovers make the most amazing thing. I've ever seen in my life the greatest food I've ever tasted. I mean, I can ruin jelly and she can turn anything into anything and interestingly enough, as we'll discuss, she can't even really tell me why that is. How are you able to do that? I don't know. It's just what works. Is that not what they say? By the way, real expertise takes longer than this. Sorry, your mileage may vary. I think one thing the Dreyfus Brothers left out that I find really interesting is the level that you're at before novice. Because when you're a novice, you've at least become sort of a mindful dummy. But I'm super interested in the person who isn't even a novice yet because that could be you and I know it could often be me. What's the step before novice? I don't even know what I don't know about what I don't know about. I'll give you a minute with that. Because there's lots of times where you can know stuff about, you could not know, you could know what you don't know about stuff. I'm getting Royal Rumsfeld here. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like, have you ever heard stuff where somebody even mentioned something and you go, that's not something I need to know about? Like, you'd be surprised. That might be a thing you want to know something about. But before you can misunderstand Ruby, you have to not know about Ruby. That's step zero. I think I might be a guru. It's a terrible cliche, but it's really true. Maslow's Hammer. I think about it all the time. It's such a cliche, but it just comes up all the time. When you don't know what problem you're solving, when you don't understand the problem domain, you will try just the craziest stuff because it's the one tool you can use without breaking your finger. Isn't that a funny thing about expertise? I will remind you. It's hard to know what you'll need to know in order to know what you'll need to know. It doesn't get easier to understand. It just gets repeated as a slide. If I do it four or five more times, I'll seem really insightful. What is a novice? We know what a novice is. Novice is the new person at the job. Novice is the person who conceivably follow the rules, but they're screwing up so often, they're not really following. At best, once you have gotten through novice level, you're basically able to boil water. You can follow the directions for boiling water without setting yourself on fire. Congratulations, you are now a novice. But isn't there something, as I say, mindful about being a novice? Am I here to take yoga? I tried yoga and boy did I ever realize the whole time that I was totally a novice. There's not a single part of yoga that was not novice for me. Every bit was excruciating. This Rodney Yee guy has a different gravity thing going on that I'm aware of. I knew the entire time I sucked hard at yoga. There was never a moment where I went, ooh, I should get a mat and a bag. The entire time I was hurting and I was feeling stupid and I was realizing there was no lower I could go. I knew about yoga, but I was not good at it. Isn't that part of the good part of being a novice is you do have a little bit of what you can in slightly massacred zen called beginner's mind. You're open to new stuff. But let's say you've been on the job for a few weeks and you've been boiling a lot of water and you don't even need the directions anymore, that is when you move on to the vaunted title of advanced beginner. And boy, do you know the advanced beginner. The advanced beginner is in the unique situation of being somebody who has virtually no idea how little they know about something. But every reason to believe they might be an unrecognized genius. You may occasionally find these people on the internet. Cause isn't it a funny thing that you can go and get some tutorials. You can get an O'Reilly book, I assume they still make those, that's what I used to get. You can go pick something up and you can have a program load until it doesn't break. This was my style of PHP, by the way. This is when I was a PHP developer, I just reloaded the page until I didn't get errors anymore. I was the ultimate advanced beginner and maybe in a gang, I'm not sure. Maybe through opening and closing tags. What a dummy. Have a work for somebody who sends you designs. I'm not talking about a designer. I'm talking about somebody in the higher up offices. You ever get in a Microsoft Word document from somebody that contains the basic design for how they want something to look? I have. I've gotten stuff on cocktail napkins. I have gotten stuff. People who should never in a million years have tried to make two lines intersect, have sent me things as the design. Now why did they do that? Do I call the plumber over to my house and tell him what kind of stuff to use to get the poop out? Oh, you're gonna want a copper plunger for that. Oh, it's way smarter when somebody doodles in Word, right? Why? Why does that happen? Because that person is experienced design everywhere. They're on the web every day. They're practically a designer already. Look at all the design they see every day. I've had thousands and thousands of omelets. I must be as old to our lord of the omelets. I could make great omelets. I've experienced the shit out of some omelets. I bet I could walk into any kitchen in America and make an amazing omelet. Have you had that feeling? I think a lot of people have had that feeling. They think all it takes is just walking in there, you give me the right tools and the mise en place. Oh yeah, that's right. I've seen Top Chef. And I will be able to cook practically anything. And I don't know, girls do this? This might be just a boy thing. But I think girls get into kung fu movies too, right? Like when I was little, if I saw me two or three kung fu movies, all I knew was I wanted to kick stuff. I was an uncontrollable kicking machine. I knew nothing about kung fu. There is nothing sadder than a 10 year old boy watching Love Boat and kicking a chair. But in my head, I was killing it. I could take the biggest dude in the room. Well you know what? You never fought the biggest dude in the room. We had a saying back in Florida, never wrestle with a pig, because you both get dirty and the pig likes it. And I think the same is true of fights and frat boys. They're super into it. They fight people all day long, right? Rules to intuition. Experience, that's that arrow. The arrow takes us from the rules to the intuition. I know enough to cover myself up and go like this, but I don't know enough to beat tracks. Beware of the advanced beginner. I've heard some people talk about, I don't want to quote this because I'm not like, I don't have Wikipedia open right now, but the Denning Kruger effect, you've heard of this. It's a really basic problem of not being able to know how little we know about something. That's why stuff like this is great. Stuff like this is great because you can get in a room and find yourself saying something really boneheaded, and then somebody else goes, you sure about that? Well, I haven't had any problems with it yet. I haven't had a job where I had to test it yet, so I assume that it works. And you go, oh, okay, that's a great opportunity. The advanced beginner does not get that. If you have shook yourself off into one area, all you can discover is how to get better at the thing that you think you're getting better at. How do you know if you're getting better at something good? How do you know if you're even getting better? That's why we stall at the advanced beginner stage. I hate to pull out the obvious ones. But when people learn just enough to try it on their own, this is one where the fans on the system weren't working, so they put a fan on, it's the same word. At every level of expertise, there's a built-in blind spot, there's a built-in cataract. There's something about it that's difficult to know. When you're at step zero and don't know nothing about nothing, you don't even know what you don't know nothing about. When you're a novice, you don't know enough about the experience of doing what you're being taught so you gotta follow the rules. When you become an advanced beginner, you have no idea how little you know. When you become confident at something, you're still gathering a lot of information as you apply stuff contextually. All the way up the line until we get to such an interesting character, the expert. I love the expert. Now just let's be clear now, this is an actual expert. This is not an advanced beginner that thinks he or she is an expert. And I feel like I know this when I see it. And this is somebody to repeat myself. This is somebody who has had to deal with different problems in different problem domains with different circumstances and different teams and different resources and different, different, different, and they still find some way to make it better than worse. Remember, just because you have not failed colossally does not mean you're an expert. It just means you don't have that much experience yet. Now I'm not saying we should go out and try to fail, but there's so much to learn from somebody, weirdly enough, so much to learn from somebody who has a hard time telling you why they think that's the best solution. Not, I'm not talking about people who are giving you a pushback or being a jerk, but just some people say, well, that's just the way I would do it. I know this goes in the Excel thing here. I know when I'm painting this, I know that that's gonna look better right there. And this brings us to my favorite example, which is the old butcher. We have a butcher shop, oh, that's blocky, sorry. We've got a butcher shop near our house back in San Francisco. And it's all old guys. I mean, I think the industry's kind of dying. What the cows are, am I right? But if you go into this place and you order some roast beef, a very old, shaky man, you say I want three quarters of a pound of roast beef. And this guy will come up there and just go shucka, shucka, shucka, shucka, shucka, cut it up, get this little pile. And then package it up. Whoa, easy techs. How about using one of those newfangled scales? And the guy'll go boom, bang, on the nose, three quarters of a pound. Have you ever had this experience? You know the kinds of things I'm talking about. You know a tailor who can guess your size when you walk in. Know your real size, not your make-believe size that you tell your friends, right? You've known people who can tell what's wrong with your car because of how it sounded when you drove up. And you've known the butcher, the old butcher, who knows this is three quarters of a pound, but can't tell you why. Oh, come on, Gramps. Don't do me like that. How do you know? How do you know that's three quarters of a pound? He goes, I just know. Yeah, yeah, but what's the life hack? What's the trick? What's the one important thing you need to know to decide that's three quarters of a pound of beef? And he says, you know the trick? The trick is be a butcher for 40 years. That's the trick. And that's why I love the expert. Because even the expert who's on top of all this stuff, top of their game, they still have blind spots out the butt. They can't tell you. Now, something Sean taught me that I think is super interesting is in some versions of this model, there is a level above the expert, which is the master, right? The master being somebody who has a broad enough knowledge of this and they actually know how to tell people how to get better at it. Isn't that interesting in places? I don't know if you all do this here, but I know for a long time at Google, Google was somewhat unique in that they have a practitioner track and a management track. Almost everywhere you go, you gotta be a manager to move up, but there are a lot of smart companies that eventually realize, you know, some of these people are really just best being practitioners. Let's let them be good at that. Let's not have the monkeys turn into the trainers unless it's absolutely necessary, with all respect. It's a very, very rough five stages. And I guess all I would say is, you know, go to Google and Google DriveFest model, because there's so much to it. There's so much interesting stuff out there. And it's one of those things where, a little bit of one of those turns out kind of things where like the more I learn about this stuff, the more I see how screwed up I am with this stuff. And it's become so beneficial for me to understand that sometimes the more you dig in on the thing that you think you really understand, the more you're shutting yourself off from the stuff in the world that could tell you what else you could be getting better at or what you should be working on next. Going back to some of the dire stuff, yeah, this does have to do with career longevity, but it has to do with relationships too. You know, just because you happen to like smoking a cigarette and walking to Walgreens doesn't mean that somebody out in the house wouldn't appreciate you using that time to take the trash instead. What should you be getting better at? And how do you know? Well, it's pretty dire. I've identified three very, very rough general patterns for this. What did that makes us want to learn what we need to know to figure out what we need to know? What are the things that make us want to get out and learn this stuff? The first and most useful one is panic. When do you panic? You panic. I'm not talking about being scared. I'm not talking about being anxious. I'm talking about panicking. Panicking is where you go, oh my God, it's too late. Panicking is going, I just woke up and all of a sudden, all the skills that I've got on my resume are not the things that are on all of those job boards. It isn't that kind of interesting how that happened. Panic, oh, come back to panic. Humility. One way to survive when trying to figure out what's going on in the world is to realize there's always more stuff that you could learn and there's always ways that you could be better. There's always ways that you could at least be open to the idea that there could be something that you're a little bit wrong about and could get better about. And then once, Sean and I have been talking about this since February, curiosity. What is it that makes this really general? But what is it that makes people awesome at what they do is curiosity. And I'm not talking about the kind of specialized work curiosity. I'm talking about people who are curious about stuff for its own sake. I'm talking about the encyclopedia browsers of the world. People who just want to know more. People who like talking to people about parties about stuff that's not stack over flow, God bless it. People who want to get out there and learn about new stuff. Now what do we know about panic? Panic's a terrible feeling. But if I think about the stuff that really motivated me, and you could call panic a form of motivation, it's a way of your body suddenly freaking out, expelling everything and saying it's time for us to run. And I think sometimes, if we've let ourselves fall into a ride, it's very natural to panic. And panic usually comes after kind of ignoring things for a while, at least in my experience. But if, at the time when they still had buggy whip stores, or buggy whip salons, I will bet you dimes the donuts that up until the month they closed, somebody there was still salesmen of the month, every month. They were still holding it together until the last conceivable second. And then the panic sets in, and then it's too late. How do you know what else is out there? Sometimes it helps to panic. I want to note in passing, though, that in the city of Westfield, there is actually a company that still makes artisanal whips. So if you do need that, I'm just saying it's still not a growth feel. But I was very happy to learn that Massachusetts is home to the Westfield whips, which sounds like a minor league softball team. Westfield pride. Humility. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I've been thinking a lot about humility. I've been thinking about the stuff that I think I know things about and what it takes before I let down my guard enough to realize I could learn more about something. A lot of stuff has been going on on the internet for the last few weeks. Different from the, well, actually it's pretty much all the same with the usual stuff. But I've been thinking a lot about the stuff that I could learn a lot from by realizing maybe the world's different than I like to believe it is, or I like to believe that the world is exactly like I think. I'm back to work, the podcast I do. My partner, Dan Benjamin, and I have an ongoing discussion about one incident that took about three minutes in his life that we're still talking about every week, where he insists all he did was drive around a bike. And then that guy got mad and banged on his window. Has anybody heard this story? Every week. And so I've had to try and walk Dan through the idea that as obscure and crazy as this sound, there's a chance he might have been doing something that he didn't even realize that he was doing wrong. I'm not saying that's the case, though, of course. Please don't tell Dan I said anything. But to me, that's humility. Humility is when I'm able to go, ah, you know what? Maybe I'm not the greatest at everything because, partly, I don't even know what everything is yet. When I was a kid, I was super into Ozzy Osbourne. The story went around that Randy Rhodes, when they were on tour before his tragic young death, not only was he one of the most shredding guitar players ever, but the story went that Randy Rhodes would, ahead of time, pre-arrange classical guitar lessons in every town that he could along the way on the tour. I could pretty much guess that he could probably teach those guys something, but that wasn't his attitude. His attitude was, I'm not freaking Randy Rhodes, his attitude was, I want to get her better at guitar every day if I can. What a huge difference, what a huge amount of humility, and it didn't make him any less. It made him greater. Curiosity. I hope this isn't making just a modicum of sense. Just a modicum would be fine. Curiosity. This is just something I've been thinking about so much in the last few years. I realize how easy it is to become incurious. It's impossibly easy to find yourself not really thinking that much about what you're not really thinking about, and being pretty satisfied that you've got it all pretty well in hand. So what do you do about curiosity? I don't have a single way in the world to tell you guys how to be more curious or what to be curious about, except to say, I think you can do it, and I think you would surprise yourself. You will surprise yourself when you become curious about more stuff. How do you do this? Well, you come to find places like this, and you meet nice people and you see Michael Love. I only have one actual piece of advice in this entire thing. This is really just an excuse to say, my God, why can't we all be more curious? When I meet people at parties or I visit with them and meet them on the street or whatever, because apparently I meet people on the street, it's kind of weird. People always want to network, they want to have cards and let's blink in, and they basically, it all comes down to trying to figure out how much money you make, it's like what people do. The thing that I will ask my friends, some of you know this, what I will ask my friends on a catch up call, what I will ask the person who's driving me here from the airport, what I will always ask every person is the same question. What are you really excited about right now? I think this is one of my favorite questions in the world for a variety of reasons. Maybe most importantly, it opens the door to us not having to talk about sports ball and money. It's letting you know that even if you're excited about Matt Fraction's Hawkeye, if you're excited about snowboarding, if you're excited about the band Fitch, I'll give it a shot, but I want you to know it's okay to tell me whatever you're excited about. I love fans, I love being a fan, and I love being around people who are super enthusiastic because I think enthusiasm has gotten really short shrift. Ask people, what are you really excited about right now? And I'd like you to think a little bit about what you're really excited about right now because you might be able to get somebody else something to be curious about, something to know more about. Does this apply directly to languages? Is this about learning the Haskells? I couldn't tell you, but if you're really excited about it, why don't you talk to some people about that? What am I saying maybe not to do? You don't need to bury yourself in RSS feeds. You don't need to bury yourself in hacker newses. I don't know, there's probably a million ways that you could give yourself way more information than my grandfather could read an entire generation. But talk to the people around you and find out what's going on because it can be pretty exciting. We're just about done. I know I'm what stands between you and the beer. Theoretically. So I'm going to amend this just a little bit. You know, rather than straight up panic, how about a kind of mindful panic? How about a panic that you're aware of? How about a panic that kind of exciting feeling that something cool might be happening? I just don't know what it is yet. Have you ever learned to differentiate that? Because that's a really good feeling. There's the one kind of feeling of like, oh my God, I'm literally going to poop myself all the time. Versus that feeling of going, oh, I'm just excited because something new is happening. It might work out great. It could feel pretty similar, but you really need to learn the difference. Because time is a factor. A kind of mindful panic. Being aware of it. So maybe you don't have to go totally panicky. But also being aware that when something has you excited. Or you know what? How about when something doesn't have you excited anymore? Are you going to do that or are you shut down to that? Do you know when something does not seem like it's as challenging as it used to be? Is it time to learn tons more about that thing? Or is it time to branch out into something else? Is it time to move from Betty Page to making web pages? I literally just made that up. And I'm talking about a kind of ready humility. I'm talking about the kind of humility that doesn't come from being shamed by other people. Or the kind of humility that comes from being insulted. Or the kind of humility that comes from finally breaking down your own barriers and realizing you're just a freakin' human being. I'm talking about a more kind of ready humility that I'm trying to adapt. I find it super difficult. But it's the kind that enables me to say, you know what, there's always a way I can get better at this. If somebody were to be, as they say, hypercritical with me, I would be able to take it. I roll. I would be able to take it and know that it's meant with the best intentions. That humility means I'm open to getting better at it. People say, at least the AdCatMobile book says, and everybody I've ever met from Pixar says, one of the things that makes Pixar so great. It's not just that they have a culture that's open to the idea of feedback. Feedback is really required. But they're also really great at knowing which feedback to give at which times. Right? Are you open to that? I'm not always open to that. And I wish I were. So ready humility means I feel that kind. And it's a nod to our host's constant curiosity. Because if you're only curious when you're panicking, that's not really curiosity. That's just being scared. See, also, you know, pooping yourself. To be curious means you're always going to be wondering, what's out there that you don't know about yet that doesn't seem like something you need to know about? How much of the stuff in your life, whether that's stuff in school or stuff in relationships, came out of things where you had no idea that was coming? You had no idea. And that's an exciting feeling. All right, I'm going to wrap this up. So I'm going to tell you why tricycles. I don't know if this will make any sense at all. This really, really hit me in the last couple of weeks. So I've got a kid. And we got our kid a three-wheeled scooter a few years ago. Now, the beauty part about the three-wheeled scooter is, like, you kind of can't hurt yourself that bad on this thing. You get the pads, you get the helmet. But it's got one, two, three wheels. You can do crazy stuff. You can start out with your foot on the brake and just start rolling. Terrible skills that do not contribute to good two-wheeled scooting. The scooter is now too small for my daughter. But she still wants to use it. It's ridiculous. She looks like a dog in the circus. She's got this little tiny thing. It's become like a child-size novelty scooter. But she kept doing it. She even eventually said, hey, you know, I really would like to have a big-girl scooter. So we got her a big-girl scooter. Thing is, we brought home the big-girl scooter. She got on it. And you know what? It didn't have three wheels, so it fell over. I'm sorry. Not so interested in the green scooter anymore. We talked a little kid scooter. We said, honey, please just give it a try. Again, now she's almost getting like back pain. I'm trying to reach over to do this. But this is what she understands. This is the thing we understand. When she was on the two-wheeled version, that felt like the broken one because she couldn't be good fast anymore. So to her, that reads as failure. When I was a little kid and I was first trying to ride a two-wheeler, I begged my parents to fix the goddamn training wheels on my stupid bike because it was wobbling. And they said, honey, it's supposed to wobble because that's how you learn how to ride a two-wheeler. You know what I'm talking about, right? If the training wheels on a two-wheeler were flushed against the ground, they wouldn't be training wheels. You'd have like an old person trike. If you didn't have that awful, horribly Buddhist-like wobble, you'd never learn how to go on two wheels. Well, that's where my kid was with this. She really did not want to get up because, please, honey, just try it. No, don't worry. This is a closed course. You've got a helmet on. No interest. It goes, what? Well, now it's getting farcical. My daughter, who's giant and continues to grow, goes back to the scooter. We even bribed her. We said, honey, for her birthday last year, we're going to get you a big girl bike. And you can pretty much guess how that went. We're back to the scooter. At this point, I was ready to give up. I don't want to shame my kid. I feel like I'm pushing her all the time. But I feel like there's something. And look at me, right? I want to be helpful. I want to explain how to ride something with two wheels. How do you explain how to ride something that has two wheels? I'm going to give her lots of really sage zen advice about centers of gravity and chakras and shit. Like, what am I going to say? You get on it and you pedal fast enough until you don't fall down anymore. Invoice. But that's just not super fun. But then a funny thing happened. Super funny, crazy thing. A couple of weeks ago out of nowhere, I think she got a little bit curious. And she said, eh, we'll give that a try. She put on the helmet, she got out, and she started falling down a lot. She fell down a lot. You know where this story is going. I didn't. I honestly thought that she was basically just going to get brain damage and still be riding this tiny ridiculous three wheel scooter. Because I'm a nice dad and I don't want to be a dick about it. So the funny thing was, and here's the part that drives me completely bananas and I wish could make sense to me. She finally decided to give it a spin. She first in the garage a little bit and then going out on the sidewalk. She was not having fun. She was basically doing this the whole time because she can't balance. She can't balance. And then something kind of ridiculous happened. The fifth time we took the big girl scooter out. In this case, she's using my scooter. But the fifth time that we went out and scooted after she tried, she suddenly had absolutely no problem riding on two wheels. And I felt like a dummy because I'd been sitting around for all that time trying to make her feel good about scooting around on her little three wheeler. And that's why I worry about advanced tricycling and the people who help us with that is because sometimes you kind of feel like if I could just get the world's most advanced, tricked out power user training wheels, I could really fly with this thing. And that's how I felt a lot. If my daughter, if I waited long enough, maybe my daughter would get super smart and be able to actually take a crescent wrench and hack her wheels so that she was able to never have to learn, but she didn't. And then an improbably weird thing happened last week and now she's trying with the training wheels on a real bike and I don't even know who this child is anymore. My role in this, getting out of the way and not giving advice. My thesis is it's hard to know what you'll need to know in order to know what you'll need to know. No one can tell you how to ride a bike. You're just going to have to figure out that bikes are cool. You fall down a lot for a while and then you get to ride wherever you want. But I don't have a pamphlet for that to make that fun while you're falling on your ass. Sometimes you got to get out of the way but you still need that curiosity. The one more thing, you get to watch, you get to watch. God, if it was this much thinner, I'd get it. Stupid apple. Don't be afraid to repot yourself. Somebody is going to repot you. Days will come along and something stupid is going to happen. Someone will die, a building will blow up, insurance didn't work out, stuff is going to change and it's going to get dumb. And you're going to have to repot yourself. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when and it's a question of how okay it's going to be when you land. That's why I say it's hard to know what you'll need to know in order to know what you'll need to know and that's why it pays to stay curious. Even and especially the things you don't know you're curious about yet. So today, if you're good, today will make you better. I said can very sagely and so I very much hope that today will make you better. Thank you, I've been Merlin.