On Expertise

Part One: What is Expertise and How is it Built?

People often greatly misunderstand expertise in a field they’re not familiar with, even if they know what it looks like for themselves. Expertise is narrow and precise. It’s a staircase that can reach great lengths over time, but still have many stairs missing here and there.

A classic example: many people assume any person who’s comfortable with technology can answer any question in the field. I was asked by an uncle to help him choose a new TV. I know some things about computers, I work in tech, surely I should be able to help here, right? Well, maybe, maybe not. I spent months researching laptops before buying my latest, learning about the technology behind Apple’s new M-series chips, learning terminology surrounding GPUs and CPUs, etc. I learned nothing about what makes for a great TV, about viewing angles and Dolby Atmos and eArc for HDMI, etc. I did research this later when it was time to buy a TV myself, but I didn’t learn it through proximity while researching laptops. Expertise is narrow and precise.

My Musical Expertise

When I was transitioning from undergrad to grad school, I needed to fund my continuing education. There were auditions held to choose the rehearsal pianist for the school operas. They included a sight-reading portion, wherein you are presented with an excerpt of music you’ve never seen before, and have to play it on sight. You may think that someone who’s been studying music for 14 years, as I had been by then, would be good at sight-reading. But I had never learned to sight-read. I was taught to read music carefully and slowly,  and memorize it as quickly as possible.

I failed miserably that first year, and didn’t get the role. To prep for the next year, I checked out large stacks of music from the school library and forced myself to imagine I was in that audition and that thousands of dollars were on the line. A year later, I came back and won the audition. Now I’m a decent sight reader, because I put in the time in that particular skill. Expertise is narrow and precise. 

Similarly, I’m not a jazz pianist. I envy jazz musicians. Maybe there will come a time when I decide to dedicate a year to just becoming mildly competent as a jazz pianist. But until that time, don’t ask me to improvise! It’s not what I was trained for.

I got two Master’s degrees, one in piano performance and another in collaborative piano. When I tell people this, I often receive confused looks. Unless they’re also musicians, the concept that collaborative piano (aka playing with others) is an entirely separate degree is baffling. But the field of classical music has been around for so long that this sort of specialization is necessary. 

Collaborative pianists have to train in so many areas that solo pianists do not because they will become regular parts of the jobs you’re required to do: how to communicate with others at the keyboard, how to handle foreign text for vocal pieces, how to coach opera singers, how to collapse an orchestral score for the piano, how to sight-read, how to transpose. 

Meanwhile, piano performance majors training to become teachers need extensive knowledge of the incredibly vast library of solo piano repertoire. There are countless hours of solo rep and each hour of music can take months to master. Some of these skills overlap and are necessary for both, and many solo pianists are great collaborators and vice versa, but there’s enough of a distinction in skill sets that people can choose these specializations.

Why Doesn’t it Feel that Way?

But, you might be getting ready to comment, isn’t it true that my techiest friend often does have knowledge and opinions about a wide range of tech? Wouldn’t it be much easier for you to learn jazz piano than me, with no piano experience? And the answer is, of course, yes. In the first case, sometimes people are simply interested broadly in a topic, and their knowledge and expertise is wide because their information gathering is wide. But they didn’t learn about great TVs through osmosis while researching computers. They learned about both items because they were interested in both.

Now, going back to the staircase analogy: it’s much easier to fill in a hard-to-reach stair if you’ve already built many stairs below it. I know I could learn jazz piano much quicker than someone with no piano background, because I have already built the “stairs” of music theory, note reading, virtuosity, scales, chords, musical form and structure, etc. But I still have to build that stair. It’s not going to magically get built in the background without any concerted effort on my part. 

Someone with expertise has extensive scaffolding that allows them easy access to address closely related topics and challenges in order to solve them. I might not know much about TVs, but my experience learning about computers might mean I found a great YouTube channel that reviews electronics, and I can quickly return to that channel as a source of trusted news. I can learn what I need to know faster than someone without that resource.

Conclusion

Now, what can someone in tech take from all this? For one, I’m hoping it demystifies expertise a little bit. It can be so intimidating to see someone in a senior position, experience their wealth of knowledge and experience, and think that you’ll never achieve what they have. It’s worth reminding ourselves that these experts didn’t magically gain this knowledge. They took the time to build out each step as they needed to. You’re seeing the whole staircase, but everyone’s staircase was built modularly. And you are on that same journey. Whatever project you’re struggling with right now will build another stair on your staircase.

This investigation also reveals an unfortunate truth: people become great in their field through constant building of new stairs. The stairs never build themselves. More on this topic in the next post!