Why Expertise Is Overrated

By 26, Orson Welles was already an accomplished theater actor, director, and producer, on and off Broadway. However, he had absolutely no filmmaking experience—not acting, not cinematography, not film production.

On his first try at filmmaking, he created one of the most legendary movies of all time, Citizen Kane.

How could a complete neophyte make one of the greatest films ever made? Nearly two decades after the film was released, a curious BBC interviewer asked where Welles found the confidence to try such a thing.

Welles responded:

Ignorance, sheer ignorance. There's no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a profession that you are timid or careful.

When asked to elaborate, Welles went on to say, “I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do…and if you come up from the bottom in the film business, you're taught all the things that the cameraman doesn't want to attempt for fear he will be criticized for having failed…[but] I didn't know that there were things you couldn't do. So anything I could think of in my dreams I attempted to photograph.”

With fearlessness fueled by ignorance, Welles innovated foundational film techniques including deep focus cinematography, an approach no film veteran had conceived of at the time.

While ignorant of film production, Welles attracted some of the top talent in the film industry to support him. In that same interview, Welles went on to say, “I had a great advantage not only in the real genius of my cameraman [famed cinematographer Gregg Toland], but in the fact that he…told me…there was nothing about camera work that…any intelligent person couldn't learn in half a day.”

Here’s the relevant clip:

But He’s Orson Welles. Can I Do That?

Outsmart the Learning Curve is for and about “regular” people. While Orson Welles is quite an exception, applying this concept to people like you and me is well within reach. Armed with ignorance and circumstance, I’ve found success in domains that I had no business entering as well. For example, Palm hired me in 1993 as a software product manager because, at that moment, it was a software company. I was such a software-oriented person; at the time I couldn’t tell the difference between mechanical and industrial engineering.

Then Palm’s founders decided the only way the company could survive was to pivot to hardware (long story). While many other Palm employees had worked at hardware companies like Apple, Grid, and Radius, I didn’t know the first thing about hardware design or production.

I started slowly, only taking on software aspects of the original Palm Pilot. But as Palm grew quickly, I ended up leading the most complex piece of hardware we had on the roadmap, the first handheld wireless device eventually called the Palm VII. How did I come up to speed?

Simply, by being unafraid to ask lots of naive questions and learning from my peers. Similar to Orson Welles, my stellar and helpful Palm colleagues served as my guard rails and convinced me that hardware wasn’t really that intimidating. I thank friend and former colleague Karl Townsend who claimed his electrical engineering job was the easiest in the world because all he did was “shop in a catalog and wire the parts together.” I’m certain I couldn’t learn what Karl knows “in half a day,” but I'm thankful that he and many other hardware engineers taught me enough to make informed decisions and were open enough to let me make significant contributions.

Do Reality Distortion Fields Work?

After coming up to speed on wireless hardware on Palm VII and later on some of the first successful smartphones, I had become one of those experts who knew “too much.” I had lost the powerful ignorance that enabled confidence in innovative ideas. I remember being amazed when first hearing that the original iPhone integrated cellular, WiFi, and Bluetooth wireless technology all in an incredibly compact form factor.

Knowing too much about how difficult it is to integrate a single wireless radio into a small form factor, the idea of integrating three wireless technologies in one device would have sounded like an “impossible” project—one that I would have labeled too risky at the time.

Implementing the insanely risky specs of the original iPhone required a very special form of ignorance—Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field. Jobs famously could convince team members that any impossible task was in fact possible. I can only imagine the depths of the reality distortion field required to persuade the team that integrating all of these technologies into one small, beautiful form factor was possible.

Steps To Entering a New Domain

What are the takeaways from the stories of Orson Welles and Steve Jobs, not to mention my own humble story? If you’re curious about entering a new domain, here are a few simple steps to take on the challenge:

1. Embrace the beginner's mindset. Don't let a lack of knowledge or experience in the new domain intimidate you.
2. Find experts who can provide guidance. While you bring a fresh perspective, learning from domain experts can help you come up to speed faster and avoid pitfalls.
3. Ask lots of questions, even if they seem naive. Don't be afraid to ask fundamental questions about the new domain to learn from those with more experience. Most people are happy to share their knowledge.
4. Recognize that most things are learnable. An intelligent person can learn the fundamentals of many fields relatively quickly. Of course, it takes much longer to become a true expert, but coming up a basic learning curve enough to make important contributions can happen quickly.

Have you ever achieved more than expected by diving into an area where you lacked expertise? Would love to hear about your experiences and thoughts in the comments!

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