I find over-and-over that there are three levels of understanding:
- Student
- Over-confident
- Student-teacher
At the first level, you’re fresh-eyed and open-minded. You aren’t yet bogged down by expectations, which means you are simultaneously: unequipped to appropriately handle the situation, yet able to compensate with a learning mentality.
The second level is where you’ve now got a bit of experience under your belt. You’ve been through it enough times where you know what to anticipate, and how to react to it. But a problem starts to arise; the strategies you’ve learned seem to stop working. Here’s what’s happened:
- Knowledge is dynamic.
- Although the core truth underlying it is constant, the framing is not—and will fail as new, conflicting situations arise.
- At first, you don’t even notice that your “knowledge” is failing you. Up until this point, it’s worked pretty well—and your overconfidence blinds you.
- Then, you start to question yourself, your own self-worth. You start to feel the imposter syndrome. And as a result, life gets much more difficult; uncomfortable; painful.
It’s not until you recognize this dynamic; humble yourself; and re-adopt a learning mentality that you can master knowledge and disseminate it to others. The lessons you learn from one situation don’t always apply to another. You have to update your understanding if you want to stay fresh.
I don’t think you ever lose knowledge. Even if a learned lesson fails you, it doesn’t mean that lesson should be discarded. (This is the Reverse entropy principle in action.)
What I find interesting is that these humps seem to appear at both a micro- and macro-level. They’re Fractal—patterns that repeat themselves, infinitely, all the way up and all the way down. It can apply to a hard skill, just as it applies to the meta-level soft skill. And—I think—with more and more compounding experiences under your belt, you start to find it easier to digest humps across the board. Which is a clue!
I believe that pushing past these humps is what life is all about.1 I’ll talk about this2 in much greater depth later, but each time you digest a hump, you:
- Increase physical entropy
- Decrease spiritual entropy
Although this process is painful, it seems to be fundamental—and very very good for you. (Which means it’s good for the universe, too)3.