What Makes an Expert?

Here’s a quick story. Honest, it will be.

The scene takes place a martial arts school. Practitioners tend to train according to their belt rank, meaning that the beginners train together while the high belt holders train together too. And then, there’s the division between adults, children and really young children.

Today is competition day for a black belt holder. It’s an important one because it will determine his odds for trying out for the national Olympic team. While he gets ready, a way younger and less experienced boy only sporting a yellow belt approaches him, bows respectfully and asks the black belt if he’d entertain a piece of advice.

Other higher ranked practitioners tell off the kid asking how he dares approach the seniors and ask mockingly what a thirteen year old yellow belt can teach a twenty-five year old national champion who olds a black belt. The judo competitor, in a wise move, decides to hear the youngster out.

The yellow belt, timidly whispers to the black belt that he would be better off if he focuses on getting his opponent to the ground and using grappling techniques to score points as opposed to trying to play the typical judo game that’s all about sweeps, throws and counters.

A whistle interrupts the conversation and the black belt steps on to the mat to compete. In the first three minutes, he gets thrown around like a toy and is amazed at the fact his opponent seems to be getting the best of his moves. At a loss of his options, he remembers the kid’s advice and forces the game to the ground when he easily obtains a submission getting him a chance to participate at the tryouts.

The following Monday, he tracks down the yellow belt and asks him how he knew about the superb strategy. “I knew who you were going to fight” says the 13-year old “so one day I spent an afternoon watching all of his fights on YouTube and quickly noticed that his ground game was poor because his stand up game is always flawless that he’s never needed to work on it.”

Thanks to TOMOYOSHI

Dear reader, what makes an expert?

Is it the PHD filled professor? Is it the individual who’s spent thirty years in the field? Is the person who’s spent hundreds of hours on research, observations and tests? Is it someone who’s had one lucky shot and now proclaims to be an expert? Is it someone who knows something that 99% of the rest of us do not know? Is it someone who knows something that you don’t know? Is it someone who can offer insight based on his or her failures?

The dictionary says that an expert is: “a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area.”

Should that mean that we should discard all advice that comes from a person or source who does not meet the above criteria?

These are questions that are debates at the moment among, would you guess it, experts themselves. For instance doctors mock traditional healers and vice versa. Marketing experts disrespectfully dismiss entrepreneurs turned consultants and so forth.

Experts don’t want people playing on their turf.

My personal take on expert and expertise is that if someone has something to say, I will pay attention no matter how trivial the information seems. I leave the interpretation up to me. Some of the marketing lessons that I ever learned were picked up from people and situations remotely related to business.

For instance, I learned from a guy who was not rich and definitely not handsome, probably the most eye-opening lesson on being different. He told me that since he was not rich or handsome, he played the dating game differently by appealing to women who were fascinated by adventure.

He basically told me that he was known as perpetual traveler and his stories would appeal to people who loved to travel but did not have the time, means or freedom. After many years, he became a local celebrity whose photos would appear in many establishments. In those photos, he would be wearing a t-shirt of the store and be at the Great Wall of China for instance.

From that I realized that in business, there were many ways to be different and with consistency, a strong brand could be developed like that. That’s something that I learned in my teenage days without taking any marketing class yet!

What makes an expert?

It’s up to you. To me, it’s anyone who tells me something I did not know or help me see a situation in a different light.