Calling yourself an “Expert”

I avoid anyone who calls themselves an “expert” in anything.

I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one. – Cato the Elder, from Plutarch’s Lives

I run into countless entrepreneurs and inventors, and many of them like to brand themselves as “expert” or, worse yet, “visionary.” I have little patience for this.

It is not that these people are well-trained, have much more expertise than I do, or are more insightful than I am. Maybe they are, but when someone crosses the line to call themselves “visionary” or “expert,” they have shown themselves to be much less than they appear to be.

Self-labeling as “expert” means they are not – almost by definition.

At the beginning of my career, engineering (my field of study) looked like a vast, expansive sea that had no end. That infinite sea of knowledge was intimidating because I knew so little.

Once I started learning bits and pieces, they started to come together. All of a sudden, I had a framework or intuition for how the whole thing worked. It all started to make sense, and everything seemed to build on each other.

I started to feel like an expert, even though I had just a decade or so of “experience.” I really, truly believed that my 10 years of engineering experience was worth something.

About 10 years in is where most people start calling themselves “experts.” They are just barely getting to see the forest for the trees, and they are just starting to have the first level of competence.

The truth is that the emperor has no clothes.

For me, I was thinking very high on myself, but I had a very humbling experience and I realized that I barely scratched the surface. I am not an expert, and I never would be.

This experience actually happened twice for me. The first time was when I was a mechanical engineer and I had finished my first, true, complete design. I thought I had my act together, and I did another design that was awful – beyond awful. I was saved only because that product never saw the light of day, and no one every knew how bad it really was.

The second time it occurred was 10+ years later, I was getting pretty good at writing patents. I was getting more efficient, my production was getting better and better. I was starting to feel my oats.

An experienced patent attorney told me that you don’t know how to write a patent until you have done 100 of them. I thought he was crazy. I knew my stuff. I poured myself into this line of work, learning everything I possibly could. No way this could be true.

At that time, I had written about 90 patents – I went back and counted. But what that guy said haunted me.

Sure enough, right at 100 patents, I started to look at my work product, and I could see he was right.

I did not realize it at the time, but I was only just starting to understand how the system really worked. And I had 100 patents in the queue – and all of them had countless mistakes that I was just starting to appreciate. I felt like I had to start all over again to learn the trade – there was so much more to learn than I ever appreciated.

25 years into this trade, I am constantly humbled by new bits and pieces that there is to learn. Hundreds of blog posts, countless podcasts, even a book, and I am still learning how to do this. When I look at the work product by self-declared “experts” in patent law, I just shake my head. What is worse is asking patent law questions to the Large Language Models and getting the worst “advice” back. It is infuriating.

Doing something for a long time does not make you an expert.

I know plenty of patent attorneys who started their careers, became reasonably proficient, but never got past the proficient stage. I saw this in engineering, too, and I suspect it is prevalent in every job.

There are some people who become comfortable. The job is working for them – they take vacations, put their kids through college, and enjoy a comfortable life. But they rarely take risks or venture to try something new. The job is something to do, and it might be interesting and even captivating at times, but their comfort zone becomes smaller and smaller, and they rarely venture out of it.

This person is not an “expert,” nor will they ever become one – at least not the type of expert you need when things get very hard.

The amount of “stick time” someone has on the job is not necessarily a good thing. Perversely, it may be the exact opposite.

When I worked at WaterPik, we had a very difficult time selling our professional oral care products. Dentists, it turns out, do not like to buy “new” products. The only way we were able to sell to dentists was to first sell to the dental schools. If the dentists were trained on our products, they would use them for 30-40 years.

I see the same thing in patent law. When I look at the way a patent is drafted, I can tell when they were trained (or when their mentor trained them). For examples, some US practitioners still use line numbers, which were more or less outlawed in the early 2000’s. 25 years later, they are still doing the exact same way they always have done it. This does not make them an expert. If anything, it makes them the opposite.

What does make you an “expert”?

In my view, having skin in the game – a lot of skin – makes an expert out of you very quickly.

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. – physicist Niels Bohr.

The true expert is someone who has pushed the boundaries, who has tested the limits, but more importantly, has taken risks. Not only do they need to take risks, they need to learn from them.

I have seen this in the angel investor community, which can be an insular social club. The club has its own rules, its own pecking order, and is just like any other social group. But I remember one guy who used the angel group to hone his skills, then he jumped out to start a (very) small venture capital fund – which turned into a rather large fund many years later.

There was a bunch of snickering and gossip at the time, but he pressed ahead. The snickering was not because the guy was making mistakes, it was because the people still in the group were envious. They all aspired to having their own fund and doing angel investing professionally, but none had the guts to put themselves out there and have a go.

That newly-minted fund manager had more skin in the game than anyone. And he learned at every turn.

The expert needs to make mistakes. They need to take the risks. Hopefully, they can recognize the implications of their failures (and less so their successes), and they can slowly get better.

I can count on one hand the number of true experts that I have ever had the pleasure to work with. It is very rare that someone devotes the energy and reflection to developing their skills, but when you find someone like that, they are a joy.

Putting the self-serving and ultimately undeserving label “expert” on oneself is an unmistakable signal that you are not that expert.

No true expert would ever say that they were an expert out loud.