Humble Expert

Seth Godin delivered a gem this morning, one that I am sharing in its entirety along with a piece of gratitude. There are a lot of important parts to this entry from Seth, but one part jumps out at me and reminds me of how grateful I am to have a humble expert on my side.

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The expertise gap

Just about everyone knows how to drive a car. Very few of us know how to build one.

For almost all of history, expertise wasn’t really a factor. If you were raised with the other hunter-gatherers, you were pretty good (good enough) at building a fire, maintaining a hut, hunting and gathering…

But as we built more complex devices, expertise started to arrive. You could tell people that you knew how to sail a boat (or build one), but it was pretty easy to separate those who had hard-won experience and expertise from the others. Either the boat reached the port or it didn’t.

The one thing that everyone is the world’s expert on is their own feelings. In just about every other area that we value, though, there are people with proven expertise, who can show their work, understand the state of the art and produce testable and measurable results.

“Experts” are part of the problem. An expert is someone who has expertise, but sometimes, they forget that past expertise doesn’t mean that they’re always right. When someone with expertise blindly supports a status quo and fails to engage in a relentless search for better, they aren’t showing expertise, they’re simply being a human.

Folk wisdom is priceless. It’s the sum total of shared human experience, usually around our emotions. But folk wisdom is not the same as folk expertise.

I think that most of us, faced with a troubling diagnosis of cancer, would prefer to find the person with the most expertise, not someone who had done a bunch of googling for twenty minutes…

And yet, particularly with the amplification of social media, there’s a devaluing of expertise. Politicians, sure, but regular folks as well. People who assert insight into anthropogenic climate change, public health or the toxicity of medical interventions. People who are sure they can understand the fine print of a 10K or analyze the approach of an athlete. Everyone is entitled to feelings about things, but expertise is earned.

Does your boat make it into port?

– Seth Godin, NOVEMBER 20, 2021

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Humble Expert

This is the paragraph that caught my attention:

The implied addition is that a humble expert is one that does the opposite. It is also implied that these are a rarity. Whatever they are – I HAVE ONE! My doctor, Dr. Mei-Dan, is a humble expert in every sense. Not immediately visible, this is his best trait that I have so fortunately come to know over 3+ years.

Example

After my right PAO, there was a tear in my abdominal wall. I woke up in the recovery room with it. It was similar to a hernia, bulging and causing searing pain every time I moved. I showed it to him at my 2-week appointment. His first reaction was that it wasn’t possible, his tools don’t go there, it has never happened before. BUUUUUUUTTTTT, anything is possible, so let’s go do some imaging and see. Maybe this is a first and there’s something to learn here.

WOW

The imaging showed a tear.

He came to me during a PT appointment the following day, owned it with an apology, and asked me to come in the very next day so he could fix it. It had never happened before but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. I am lean so my layers are thinner and easier to bother.

Always Learning

Dr. Mei-Dan is constantly researching, creating advancements, and publishing papers. There is no such thing as the status quo for him. Dissatisfied with other techniques and outcomes, even created his own PAO surgical technique.

N of 1

With my pubic fusion, I am n of 1 and he has made it fun. It is such a rare surgery, there is not enough data to glean healing information from. Plus, with my metal allergy, there is NO other data. At my appointments, we look at the images and progress with pure curiosity. Every question I ask is met with “I don’t know.” I LOVE THAT! So, we go along not knowing together, like Star Trek voyagers, patiently and excitedly waiting to see what will happen. He is the expert but we are a team.

This takes humility on top of expertise. For this, I am not only grateful but comforted.

Thank you, Dr. Mei-Dan.

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