Early Career | A Guide to supercharge your learning: Navigating the Dunning-Kruger curve

Multiple components that regularly include communication, documentation, negotiation, along with job based skill-sets, are different from what can be taught in a college. For an early in career individual, these skills, if learned and honed in the initial stages can help them throughout their career. This does not mean that they can't learn these skills later, this doesn't also mean that they don't have to learn new skills going forward. This, however, implies that these skills, built early can be kept as foundations and then, can be honed and sharpened through re-learning and unlearning as experience grows.

In this article, rather than talking about useful skill sets, we talk about the process of navigating the learning process itself preventing the usual trenches of under-confidence and unstable equilibrium of overconfidence, both of which act as blockers to learning. The process makes you more mindful of your journey. The awareness of where you might be in the journey, helps in accelerating your overall speed, making the process of navigating through the curve fast.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a mapping of the estimated confidence against the experience in the field. Those in early career have a tendency to get stuck in the 'Mount of Peak Stupid', the Under-Confidence trench, or might even never climb the mountain in the first place after failing a few times!

Here's a detailed guide to traverse each space~

The Beginner's Luck

The initial portion of the image is the phase that I call the beginner's luck. When you start something, you have cheat-sheets and intuition at their maximum levels. You have some amount of help from people that are teaching you and consequently you perform well. Sometimes though, you fail terribly the first time, in which case, you never try again. But in most cases, your first attempts are successful, thanks to assistance and multiple things that you didn't have to take care of.

Realising you are in Phase 1:

1. You have just started working on the subject
2. You are watching tutorials, learning from experts in the field
3. You are doing too good (seem to have a natural thing for it) or you are not able to do anything at all

Navigating through the Phase 1:

1. Try to get a pathway to get some progress
2. Pick a complex problem and try to understand the real depth of the subject
3. Find a mentor to learn things

Potential Outcome

You might end up being disappointed with your initial progress and may end up not pursuing the learning any further. It is good to re-evaluate whether this is something useful. If it is useful, give it a sincere effort with help. (Chances of quitting learning). The way here is to show grit, use all clues, use all available help, set pomodoros and remember why you started!

Good Outcome: In other cases, you will receive success and reach Phase 2

The 'I see no god up here, except me'

After a few bad runs, success will come a lot easier. You'll find things are flowing to you effortlessly and you are operating at a rate that experienced people flow at. This is wrong. Repeating for those in the back. THIS IS WRONG.

The location in the graph marked in red is of overconfidence. It refers to the point where due to great experience initially, you assume that you assume that the subject is fairly easy and you are heavily skilled in it.

Realising you are in Phase 2:

1. Things are easy, you assume that people doing this for years are less talented
2. You are talking way more than you are expected to, you seem to be the know-it-all in conversations
3. You feel like you should move to the next topic on your list

Navigating through Phase 2:

1. Disappoint yourself: By attempting real problems
2. Acknowledge that you can't be a master in a such less time
3. Control your speech, don't be obnoxious

Potential Outcomes of the Phase:

1. You might end up quitting realising that you know everything and were born a master (Chances of quitting)
2. You will sour your relationship with your mentors by being overconfident
3. Good outcome: You quickly realise that you were undervaluing experience

The valley of regret:

So, finally. You realise that you didn't know as much. It was your mentors and your conditions making you into the obnoxious self-imposing human that you had become. A master? Huh. You currently feel worse than a complete beginner. Add to that the regret of being such a bad person to people. Add to that the relationships that suffered. And to make things worse, you aren't performing good either.

Sorry for stabbing you with a hundred knives up there. Believe me, this is not even 10% of the mental chatter that will ensue. The orange portion of the graph is what I call the trench/valley of regret.

Realising you are in Phase 3:

1. You feel stupid, incapable, unworthy
2. You are unable to do the things that you were able to do a while back
3. You hate the process of learning the subject

Navigating the third phase:

1. Assume the best: Believe that you are still amazing
2. Be apologetic, improve your relationships, good time to get the humility you missed
3. Stay on it, even if you feel utterly stupid

Potential Outcomes of the Phase:

1. You go to your comfort areas: I hate conical geometry, let me do differentiation (Chances of quitting)
2. You sour your relationships further by showing insincerity after the obnoxiousness
3. You get humble and realise that you have a lot to learn

The Impostor's Inflexion

You are humble now. Humble enough that people see your sincerity. Humble enough that you realise that you have a lot to learn. Humble enough to double your learning. Humble enough to start receiving recognition and credibility again.

Humble enough to succumb to an Impostor's syndrome

Self plug: Ctrl+Click (or command + click) on this link for my take on Impostor Syndrome

Potential Outcomes of the sub-phase:

1. You are scared, you double up your efforts to not be caught pretending
2. You are motivated to learn, and hoping that you are not in the peak of overconfidence again

Flowers for the master

Ah, there is no navigation here, it's just pure will. There's flowers all around. Add to that mutual admiration among the masters. Add to that a feeling of self satisfaction. Add to that sweet memories of the previous phases and how you fought them.

Conclusions

There are 5 Major phases in a learning curve

1. Beginner's luck
2. Peak of overconfidence
3. Trench of regret
4. Inflexion of the Impostor
5. Flowers for the master

The first three phases compel you to quit and you need to expend willpower to stay and reach 4th and 5th phases. You can shorten the first three phases by being mindful of where you are.

Thanks for reading a blog for the early in career, from another early in career!