Society values expertise, not intelligence

Christopher J Bednar Jr — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 17:47:27 +0000

We often avoid things that are hard because they make us feel stupid. To make matters worse, some people grow up being told that they are smart, which creates an identity in their mind about the fact that they are smart.

Nonetheless, when you are faced with a challenging task, you procrastinate and/or avoid facing these difficult things. And you avoid these things because they make you feel dumb.

You can re-frame this. You aren't "dumb" or "stupid." You are simply inexperienced. And to become experienced, you need to, you guessed it, gain experience. You do this by facing challenging tasks.

This mindset turns something negative ("Wow, I feel stupid") to a positive thing ("I'm learning from experience"). What society values is not intelligence. Society values expertise.

I think the biggest indicator of this in my own life is my software development skills.

I feel dumb a lot of time. I don't know everything and constantly face things that I don't know. But you know what? 5 years ago, something that would make me struggle for hours (and sometimes days) is second nature to me now.

It's like I'm climbing a mountain, and all I can see is the fact that I'm not at the top and have a long way to go.

But if you turn around and look down the mountain, you'll see just how much you've already climbed... You are not at the bottom of the mountain by any means.

I spent all day...

Christopher J Bednar Jr — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 01:01:14 +0000

I just spent the entire day working on a bug in a deployment pipeline for one of the services my team manages.

After spending hours and hours trying to figure out what the problem was, I came across the solution. I created a file named 'requirements.yaml' and put it in wrong directory. It was almost in the right place, which made it hard to notice that it wasn't.

At first, I felt disappointed that I missed something so incredibly obvious and felt dumb. Especially considering that I've been a software developer in the industry for about 5 years.

But, I reframed this thought. I actually learned quite a lot. I learned a lot because it forced me to learn. I was reading, very carefully, the documentation pertaining my company's software development process. This resulted in me learning more about Kubernetes, Jenkins, Helm charts, etc that I wouldn't have learned otherwise. I didn't waste time; I learned a lot in this process.

Even though this seemed like a silly mistake, working through it made me a better developer... The more you struggle and overcome, the stronger you become.

DEV Community: Christopher J Bednar Jr

Society values expertise, not intelligence

I spent all day...