An expert is someone with the special skill or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subject. It is often said that it takes 10 years to become an overnight success. It takes a lot of time to develop expertise in a particular subject matter (10,000 hours). A lot of great ideas and dreams have been killed by so-called experts that come in different shapes and forms such as parents, teachers, friends, colleagues, scientists, mentors and doubting thomases. As Will Smith told his son in the movie, The Pursuit of Happyness:
You got a dream. You got to protect it. People can’t do something themselves… they want to tell you, you can’t do it. If you want something, go get it. Period.
Here are some great quotes on expertise:
- An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until finally, he knows everything about nothing. – Nicholas Butler, American Philosopher
- First people will tell you that you are wrong. Then they will tell you that you are right, but what you’re doing really isn’t important. Finally, they will admit that you are right and that what you are doing is very important; but after all, they knew it all the time. – Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine.
- The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence. – Charles Bukowski
- That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work. – Henry Ford, My Life, and Work
- In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few. – Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice
- Nothing is more confusing than people who give good advice but set a bad example. – Norman Vincent Peale
Don’t let your boy’s schooling interfere with his education.– Mark Twain
- Experts tend to be confident that they have all the answers and, because of this trait, they can kill new ideas. But when you are trying to break new ground, you have no interest in getting stuck in engineering conventions or intellectual mud. – James Dyson, A Life by James Dyson
- Definitely consider the expertise of those who provide counsel, but evaluate those opinions against things that may be beyond the expert’s vision—like your long-term goals. -Ken Segall, Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success
- True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. – Daniel Kahneman
- For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before. For the expert, novelty is nuance. – Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
- An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. – Niels Bohr
Uncle said I’ll never sell a million records, I sold a million records like a million times – Jay-z, Crown (Magna Carta Album)
- Too many leaders are like bad travel agents. They send people places they have never been. Instead, they should be more like tour guides, taking people places they have gone and sharing the wisdom of their own experiences.- John Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable laws of leadership
- The average person suffers from three delusions: (1) that he is a good driver, (2) that he has a good sense of humor, and (3) that he is a good listener. – Steven Sample,The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership
- Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience. – Denis Waitley
- An expert is a man who tells you a simple thing in a confused way in such a fashion as to make you think the confusion is your own fault. – William Castle
- I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. – Bruce Lee,
All the Best in your quest to get Better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
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