Absolute vs Relative Expert... Which are you? Which is better?

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Are you an expert?

You might be.

You’re almost certainly an expert in something relative to most everyone you know.

As an entrepreneur, you better darn well be an expert at something!

What is an expert anyway?

With the amount of raw information flooding our brains over the last couple of years, the meaning of the word “expert” has to be extended… from someone who has vast in-depth knowledge about a certain narrow topic, to someone who simply knows more than you about a subject.

That is, there are two kinds of experts:

absolute experts and
relative experts.

Let’s dig a little deeper…

Absolute Expert

It’s a little known fact, but I am world authority on a certain type of implicit discrete element schemes. If you don’t know what that means, that’s ok. It’s not a very big market. While it’s terribly interesting to me and approximately one dozen other people, it’s not much of a basis for making a living!

The focus required to become an absolute expert are often blinds one to the “ground truth” of their subject matter. In numerical modeling using discrete or finite element methods, the danger to the expert is not calibrating the numerical results with how material actually behaves in the real world.

For another example, the current global depression is being marketed as a “Black Swan” event, something no one could have foreseen. The fact is many people saw it coming and took active steps to protect themselves financially. Most of these people, including myself, are not economists. We just looked at fundamentals, looked at our life experience, and knew something was very badly wrong!

Relative Expert

This means simply that I know more than you about something. Or that you know more than me about some other thing.

“Real” experts often develop a considerable amount emotional distress when faced with relative experts, who from the “real” expert’s 10,000+ hour perspective are little better than charlatans.

The problem that real experts have is that their knowledge is often too erudite or too specialized to have much practical application. Relative experts, being much closer to the ground truth, don’t have this problem.

Should Expertise Imply Instruction?

In my opinion, being either sort of expert, relative or absolute, should imply the capability of communicating or teaching what you know to other people, such that your instruction encourages useful and immediate action.

Transmitting simply the information isn’t all that valuable, people can read about almost anything for free on the internet. Enabling people to take action, to acquire knowledge from such information, is much more difficult.

Your Expertise

Do you have an area of absolute expertise? Is it rare? Esoteric? Valuable? Interesting? Post a comment, tell the world about it!

What about relative expertise? Make a list of those things you know that you could teach others.

It should go without saying—but I’m saying it anyway—that someone in a position of relative expertise should not present themselves as an absolute expert on a subject. In fact, this article was inspired by the following tweet from Kathy Sierra:

Wondering if people who dislike/distrust “so-called experts” have been burned by those who mistake experience for expertise.

To be fair, being an expert without experience is not very useful. An old saw states A good theory is a practical man’s best friend.

When you’re just starting out

When you’re new to a subject, most everyone with experience has more knowledge than you do. Incrementally acquiring knowledge should not be expensive. Learn by doing, and do a little every day.

After you accumulate some experience, you become more knowledgable than an increasing number of people. Acquiring deeper or more useful knowledge becomes more personally time consuming, or more expensive to purchase… but the value of your knowledge to others goes up as well.