How to Become an Expert?

I am going to share a short story of Mike, a former client, mentor, and a friend who moved on a few years ago. (May he find peace and happiness in heaven and beyond.)?Mike was a business executive; at the height of his career, he was the CEO of a Citibank division. I met Mike in my mid-thirties, and he was the Chief Operating Officer of a newly formed Columbia University’s Teachers College innovation center. Mike was highly intelligent and energetic, and I wondered back then whether I could keep up even though I was twenty years younger. Even though he started as a client, we quickly became friends. Both of us have common interests in tasty food and higher education (which I just started teaching as an adjunct professor at Montclair State University). Since he was older and wiser, he self-volunteered to be my mentor, which I am still grateful to this day. Over food and drinks, we pontificated, and occasionally, we talked about our careers. Mike thought that the best career for me was to become a guru because I like to think, write, talk, weave different ideas together, and share them. Plus, I occasionally have original insights. While we were both doubtful of the quality of my ideas, I made up in quantity. Personally, I am not sure if I am guru material because I associate the label “guru” with people like Tony Robbins or Deepak Chopra. I simply do not have the capability (or desire) of asking people to walk on hot coal and rely on faith. But I wanted to be an expert in something. What started as a casual banter set the stage of an expedition of discovery – how to become an expert.

Now, nearly twenty years later, that serendipitous conversation still resonates with me today. While I have not achieved the status of being a guru, I have slowly become an expert. I am quite good at getting strategic and complex things done, through utilizing disciplines like project, program, portfolio, risk, and agile management and business execution. This article highlights some insights that I have gathered so far on this journey. Here are six insights that was indispensable in becoming an expert:

1. Open Mind. Confucius had a famous saying: “三人行, 必有我师,” roughly translated to “With three people walking together, there is always a teacher among them.”?In plain language, this phrase means there is always something one can learn from everyone. Just watch kids play in the playground. I had some experiences when I took my daughter to a local park when she was younger. She would jump on a roundabout. As she was spinning and somehow started chatting with other kids, she started making friends. The next thing I knew, she and a bunch of kids produced many ways to have fun. Here I was thinking of how to assemble a high performing project team. A few years ago, before the pandemic, I avidly went to my university’s recreation center to exercise. There was an older custodian, and he was often there cleaning the lockers and bathroom. I always noticed how thoroughly he focused on even the smallest details, such as wiping not just the surface areas but also underneath the bench. We started chatting, and he was proud of keeping the gym immaculately clean. Watching him work it puts me to shame that if I were just as half as diligent as him, the quality of my work could be so much better. Becoming an expert requires an open mind to embrace innovative ideas, to inspect one’s own biases, and to learn important teachings large and small, especially in those chitchat moments with Mike.

2. Focus. This was a difficult rule for me as I have many interests, and my mind jump around a lot. I probably would have been diagnosed with some form of ADHD, but they were not available in China when I was young. I also realized early on that while I have above average intelligence, my mental capability does not even come close to what I needed if I were to pursue all my interests. Thus, I was forced to prioritize and focus. In my last article, I discussed creating a Venn diagram with multiple circles representing a) what you like to do, b) what are your strengths, c) what are marketable skills, and perhaps even additional circle representing other needs.?Focus here means examining the overlapping areas, and the more the overlaps, the more focus you become. For example, in my early thirties, I think about what I wanted to do if I could do anything in the world, especially if making money is no longer a high priority. I drew four circles then: a) my interest – I enjoy working with people and I enjoy solving problems (my engineering training kicked in); b) my strengths – optimizing and balancing strategic and tactical considerations (my philosophy teaching manifested itself here); c) my desire for feedback – I am an ambivert, requiring both internal and external validations; d) my sense of accomplishment - I like stretching myself but not take on impossible goals.?By revisiting it regularly, I sharpened my focus. Mike also shared an additional insight that became a cornerstone in my journey to be an expert. If people can weave multiple specialties together (such as project management, organization change, strategic implementation, and portfolio management), then everyone can become experts. If you are reading this, ask yourself these question: What should be your focus? What are the overlapping areas in that Venn diagram?

3. Blend work/life. During the summer before I turned ten, a friend introduced me to a job at a printing company in the infamous sweatshop district of New York City. The company published a bunch of bad books, and they wanted kids to help remove staples from the binding. The pay was $3.50 per hour, which was a lot of money back then. I worked three or four weeks that summer removing staples. (In retrospect, I am not sure if it was legal for a nine-year-old to work in a factory. But being a first-generation immigrant in the U.S., money was often in short supply. Plus, it was a fun way of spending part of the summer in a big factory.) Since that first job, I have always worked throughout my elementary, middle school, and high school years being a server, mowing lawns, making eyeglasses, and running my software exchange company in high school. But when I started working for large companies after college, I quickly came close to burnout. I tried to find work-life balance, but it did not work out. I was already a mild workaholic then, and the inner desire to make something of myself was strong. This is when I came across an article on “work-life blending.” Unlike work-life balance, blending is more of a synthesis of work and life, something that made sense to me. Over the next decade, I started aligning various parts of my life and blended them together. First, I forced myself to learn one topic well – project management. Project management originally did not stand out much as a major interest area, but as I became better at it, especially after attaining the PMP certification in 2003, it created a virtuous reinforcement cycle. At Montclair State, I revamped an old course in project management and started teaching it. Project management eventually became a mandatory course in some curriculums. At work, I could build a credible record of leading projects and programs, and I progressively attained more responsibilities. Slowly, one part of my life influenced another part as I gained knowledge, experience, and credibility, and I became quite productive, especially in the last decade with writing, speaking, teaching, researching, and consulting. Being an expert is taxing, and it is so much easier if you can synthesize and align multiple dimensions of your life together.

4. Walk fast. When I was young, I could run fast. But being young and arrogant, I did not warm up. By my late twenties, I developed all kinds of problems from my Achilles to my knee. I had to slow down. My physical limitations combined with the sensation of burnout in my mid-twenties gave me the insight that still fueled my pace to this day. I learned to walk fast, faster than most of my peers and competitors in term of developing oneself through education, professional certifications, working and trying new experiences, and continually learning. But I rarely sprint because burnout can be so painful to recover. Work is just one dimension, an important one, but there are other dimensions too, like family and friends. Thus, using the analogy of power walk, I can maintain a fast pace for an exceptionally long time. So, find your optimal pace, and the key is in its sustainment.

5. Embrace change. When I was at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), I was in the Change Management Competency. The company has permanently planted in my mind that change is neither good nor bad; it is just inevitable. As a management consultant, every new client is a change, just like every project. Stepping into unfamiliar offices or working with new project teams can be intimidating and sometimes be daunting, at least at first. Like the first insight, open mind, embracing change is also a mindset - there is always something you can do to improve. Project results can always be better; bad situations, regardless of how terrible, can also be opportunities; knowledge and expertise, regardless of how strong or well established, do not last forever. By embracing change, people are enhancing their neuroplasticity to adapt and accept the latest ideas. Thus, unless you want to be an expert for a short duration, start embracing changes and open your minds to new ideas.

Later in life, Mike became a college professor too. I believe he would be happy knowing that our conversations mattered. Now you know my “secret sauce”, make them your own and add your insights too.?Send me an occasional note and let me know how you are doing. Oh, I forgot about the final rule: becoming an expert is a journey, not a destination. Enjoy the voyage.