Areas Of Expertise Quotes

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

When I say develop your skills, I don’t mean related to every business area of that industry. This is not very realistic. I mean, the field of your expertise in that industry.

Her areas of expertise are bar codes, book titles and maps - she has an original Parker Brothers map of the world.

I should have known what you would do,” Jem said in a low voice. “I always know what you will do. I should have known you would put your hands into the fire.” “And I should have known you would throw that packet away,” said Will, without rancor. “It was—it was a madly noble thing to do. I understand why you did it.” “I was thinking of Tessa.” Jem drew his knees up and rested his chin on them, then laughed softly. “Madly noble. Isn’t that meant to be your area of expertise? Suddenly I am the one who does ridiculous things and you tell me to stop?” “God,” said Will. “When did we change places?” The firelight played over Jem’s face and hair as he shook his head. “It is a very strange thing, to be in love,” he said. “It changes you.” Will looked down at Jem, and what he felt, more than jealousy, more than anything else, was a wistful desire to commiserate with his best friend, to speak of the feelings he held in his heart. For were they not the same feelings? Did they not love the same way, the same person? But, “I wish you wouldn’t risk yourself,” was all he said. Jem stood up. “I have always wished that about you.” Will raised his eyes, so drowsy with sleep and the tiredness that came with healing runes that he could see Jem only as a haloed figure of light. “Are you going?” “Yes, to sleep.” Jem touched his fingers lightly to Will’s healing hands. “Let yourself rest, Will.

I have learned that newborn infants roll their eyes around and move their heads and their arms in short jerky spasms. And if you homeschool them, they will stay this way forever.

In addition to specific areas of expertise, it's crucial to consider the overall balance and diversity of the board. A board with a mix of ages, genders, ethnicities, and professional backgrounds is more likely to bring a wide range of perspectives and experiences to the table, leading to more robust discussions and better decision-making.

This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.

Manly deeds, womanly hands.

Don’t worry about it. Just look ahead to the next question. You didn’t get here by accident. You passed the test. You deserve to be here. These categories maybe don’t line up with your areas of expertise. But you’re bright. Keep your head up. Move forward. Keep going.

We have all been empowered by the web: everyone with a keyboard can now effectively broadcast to a national audience. In a sense, it puts each of us on the same footing as the major media conglomerates, except for AOL, who now apparently own all our thoughts and teeth.

Don’t limit yourself, discover new areas of expertise

-The Wallflower A wall flower at a dance is not always a wall flower everywhere. We all have our areas of expertise and our areas of inability or inexperience. The problem is that many people become wallflowers in too many areas of their lives because they have given things a try and felt foolish in the end. And because no one likes to appear foolish many decide that it is better to simply blend in. “If I don’t do anything different, I won’t ever look foolish,” the reason, “No one will laugh at me or tease me.” Why are we so concerned about what our peers think of what we are doing, wearing, or saying??? One of my favorite quotes is by Earl Nightingale. He said, “You wouldn’t worry so much about what other people thought of you if you only realized how little they do.” Exactly. Most people are too worried about themselves to really care about what you are doing! And for those who can put on blinders and remain oblivious to the possible embarrassment of total failure, it is usually cheers – and not jeers – that await them.

If I have any expertise, it is in the realm of spiritual darkness: fear of the unknown, familiarity with divine absence, mistrust of conventional wisdom, suspicion of religious comforters, keen awareness of the limits of all language about God and at the same time shame over my inability to speak of God without a thousand qualifiers, doubt about the health of my soul, and barely suppressed contempt for those who have no such qualms. These are the areas of my proficiency.

You say you have nothing to write about? How do you find things to talk about? You can write about those things you like to talk about, that's your area of expertise

We're in a bad situation, and bad situations happen to be my area of expertise.

This is not to say there are not Chicagoans. But I would suggest that they are a nomadic people, whose lost home exists only in their minds, and in the glowing crystal memory cells they all carry in the palms of their hands: a great idea of a second city, lit with life and love, reasonable drink prices at cool bars, and, of course, blocks and blocks of bright and devastating fire.

How to Win a Fight - Step 1: Always make eye contact. Step 2: Go ahead and use henchmen - these days it's unnecessary and frowned upon to fight your own battles, especially with so many henchmen out of work. Step 3: Run lots of attack ads - I have run about 500 attack ads this year, and I expect that I will buy even more air time next year, because my enemies are getting stronger.

Your calling is you unique area of expertise

The implication was that either the people in the room needed to change their areas of knowledge and expertise or people themselves needed to be changed

The mental arena isn’t my area of expertise,” he said, “but I know this: your thoughts can be the enemy, or you can make them your ally.

A corporation can do many things that an employee cannot, like pay expenses before paying taxes. That is a whole area of expertise that is very exciting. Employees earn and get taxed, and they try to live on what is left. A corporation earns, spends everything it can, and is taxed on anything that is left. It’s one of the biggest legal tax loopholes that the rich use.

Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.49 In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification).

It sounded like the usual—seduce and ruin, my area of expertise, also my area of boredom.

We've all got our own areas of expertise.

And are we not worthy?” she asked, rolling the end of one ceramic chopstick back and forth between the thumb and index finger of her right hand. “Are our lives devoid of merit? Are we not generous to our friends, kind to strangers, skilled in our areas of expertise, reliable with rent, gentle with children, quick to phone an ambulance when we see a man hit by a car, thoughtful in word and deed? Do we not have worth enough? Are we not already perfect? Perfectly ourselves? Perfect in being who we are?” “I have no one to measure that quality against.” “Do you believe in God?” “No.” “Do you have eyes, judgement?” “And I see the world, but I have no one else’s eyes to measure my own vision against.” “Of course you do. You have the words of friends and strangers. You have discourse and reason. You have critical thought, which may be trained to the highest degree. In short, you do not need the world to tell you what to be. Especially if the world tells you that you are never good enough.

We traipsed back in again to inspect the damage. At least, Pennyroyal and Markham inspected the damage; Smallhope searched the prisoners and I put the kettle on. We all have our own areas of expertise.

Pointing to the mutual envy of businessmen and politicians who are often out of their field in each other's area,, the author quotes the wisdom, "A wise shoemaker sticks to his trade and maintains a mouthful of nails.

Don’t be afraid to say no to projects. Prove that you’re serious about specialization by turning down work that falls outside your area of expertise. The more people you say no to, the more referrals you’ll get to people who need your product or service.

Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know.

Don't worry about it. Just look ahead to the next question. You didn't get here by accident. You passed the test. You deserve to be here. These categories maybe don't line up with your areas of expertise. But your bright. Keep your head up. Move forward. Keep going.

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders. What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.

On the Soyuz, there’s simply not room to fly someone whose main contribution is expertise in a single area. The Russian rocket ship only carries three people, and between them they need to cover off a huge matrix of skills. Some are obvious: piloting the rocket, spacewalking, operating the robotic elements of the ISS like Canadarm2, being able to repair things that break on Station, conducting and monitoring the numerous scientific experiments on board. But since the crew is going to be away from civilization for many months, they also need to be able to do things like perform basic surgery and dentistry, program a computer and rewire an electrical panel, take professional-quality photographs and conduct a press conference—and get along harmoniously with colleagues, 24/7, in a confined space.

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? If you put ten people in a room and they have to choose an ice cream flavor, they’re gonna arrive at vanilla. There is always constant pressure to conform. But originality only happens on the edges of reality. And working on that line is always dangerous because it’s only a short step to disconnected insanity. So resist temptations and advice to play to the middle. The best work always comes from pushing the edge.

We are all capable of foolishness, it's just that we have a different area of expertise.

Because you can't unknow your life's experiences,' Grif said. This was his area of expertise.

Especially when it came to the videogames. Videogames were my area of expertise. My double-weapon specailization. My dream Jeopardy! category.

We can learn so much looking outside our core field of expertise.

Expertise in any given single area is not enough to guarantee either prudent policies or the avoidance of blunders.

We tend to assume that when people are experts at one thing, their expertise extends to other areas as well.

Mission Control Center (MCC) at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) has got to be one of the most formidable and intellectually stimulating classrooms in the world. Everyone in the room has hard-won expertise in a particular technical area, and they are like spiders, exquisitely sensitive to any vibration in their webs, ready to pounce on problems and efficiently dispose of them.

Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.49 In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse

When, one day, Kamaswami held against him that he had learned everything he knew from him, he replied: “Would you please not kid me with such jokes! What I’ve learned from you is how much a basket of fish costs and how much interests may be charged on loaned money. These are your areas of expertise. I haven’t learned to think from you, my dear Kamaswami, you ought to be the one seeking to learn from me.

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.

As entrepreneurs we have a “can do” mindset. This often means that when something needs to be done, we are tempted to just roll up our sleeves and just do it. However, spending a lot of time doing things that aren’t your area of expertise or aren’t a good use of your time can quickly become a very expensive exercise. Remember, money is a renewable resource—you can always get more money but you can never get more time.

The worldwide destruction of the feminine knowledge of agriculture evolved over four to five thousand years by a handful of white male scientists in less than two decades has not merely violated women as experts but, since their expertise is modeled on nature’s system of renewability, has gone hand in hand with the ecological destruction of nature’s processes and the economic destruction of poor people in rural areas.

In the process, Albuquerque was consolidating a revolutionary concept of empire. The Portuguese were always aware of how few they were; many of their early contests were against vastly unequal numbers. They quickly abandoned the notion of occupying large areas of territory. Instead, they evolved as a mantra the concept of flexible sea power tied to the occupation of defendable coastal forts and a network of bases. Supremacy at sea; their technological expertise in fortress building, navigation, cartography, and gunnery; their naval mobility and ability to coordinate operations over vast maritime spaces; the tenacity and continuity of their efforts—an investment over decades in shipbuilding, knowledge acquisition, and human resources—these facilitated a new form of long-range seaborne empire, able to control trade and resources across enormous distances. It gave the Portuguese ambitions with a global dimension.

One of the many interesting and appealing things about questioning is that it often has an inverse relationship to expertise—such that, within their own subject areas, experts are apt to be poor questioners. Frank Lloyd Wright put it well when he remarked that an expert is someone who has “stopped thinking because he ‘knows.’”2 If you “know,” there’s no reason to ask; yet if you don’t ask, then you are relying on “expert” knowledge that is certainly limited, may be outdated, and could be altogether wrong.

In a field you’re already familiar with—like your own job—think carefully about what characterizes good performance and try to come up with ways to measure that, even if there must be a certain amount of subjectivity in your measurement. Then look for those people who score highest in the areas you believe are key to superior performance. Remember that the ideal is to find objective, reproducible measures that consistently distinguish the best from the rest, and if that ideal is not possible, approximate it as well as you can. Once

Fast flow requires restricting communication between teams. Team collaboration is important for gray areas of development, where discovery and expertise is needed to make progress. But in areas where execution prevails—not discovery—communication becomes an unnecessary overhead.

Capacity for keen observation • Exceptional ability to predict and foresee problems and trends • Special problem-solving resources; extraordinary tolerance for ambiguity; fascination with dichotomous puzzles • Preference for original thinking and creative solutions • Excitability, enthusiasm, expressiveness, and renewable energy • Heightened sensitivity, intense emotion, and compassion • Playful attitude and childlike sense of wonder throughout life • Extra perceptivity, powerful intuition, persistent curiosity, potential for deep insight, early spiritual experiences • Ability to learn rapidly, concentrate for long periods of time, comprehend readily, and retain what is learned; development of more than one area of expertise • Exceptional verbal ability; love of subtleties of written and spoken words, new information, theory, and discussion • Tendency to set own standards and evaluate own efforts • Unusual sense of humor, not always understood by others • Experience of feeling inherently different or odd • History of being misunderstood and undersupported • Deep concerns about universal issues and nature, and reverence for the interconnectedness of all things • Powerful sense of justice and intolerance for unfairness • Strong sense of independence and willingness to challenge authority • Awareness of an inner force that “pulls” for meaning, fulfillment, and excellence • Feelings of urgency about personal destiny and a yearning at a spiritual level for answers to existential puzzles

Although Martin Toscher, MD, is considered an authority in his field, he would gladly trade his laurels to completely eliminate his area of expertise. Examining one child for evidence of sexual abuse is more than enough; the fact that he's logged hundreds of cases in Maine is phenomenally disturbing.

Don't concentrate on becoming a better humor writer, just concentrate on being the best writer that you can become. If you're funny, the work will end up being funny. And if you're not funny, the work will still end up being good. Concentrate on being the most honest writer you can be, and let everything else follow--because it will.

Facing uncertain environments and wicked problems, breadth of experience is invaluable. Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient. The problem is that we often expect the hyperspecialist, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems. The results can be disastrous.

There were individuals in every discipline who recognized writing problems but wanted no part of addressing them: some regarded them as outside their expertise or area of responsibility; others thought students should be held more accountable, be better prepared in high school, or not admitted at all if they lacked the requisite language skills for university writing.

What constitutes due process has evolved over hundreds of years and is rooted in both pragmatism and deep philosophy. It recognizes several truths about human nature: people can be mistaken in what they remember or believe; people do falsely accuse their neighbors; people can even convince themselves that false things are true if they desire to punish someone they hate or feel has wronged them; and we must limit people in power to enforcing clear laws fairly to avoid abuse of the system. Judges and juries have their own biases, blind spots, areas of expertise, and areas of ignorance, all of which need to be systemically balanced out (through processes for appeal, for example) to minimize the likelihood that people are unfairly punished.

Entertaining is not my area of expertise, I’ll admit that, but surely, if you are a host, you are responsible for ensuring that your guests are provided with a libation? That’s a basic principle of hospitality, in all societies and cultures, and has been since recorded time. In the event, I drank tap water—I rarely imbibe alcohol in public. I only really enjoy it when I’m alone, at home.

Social media channels and online discussion forums are quickly becoming hotbeds where people who share a common domain expertise can debate and discuss the latest trends in their area of shared interest. Participating in these groups also increases the odds of serendipity – coming across a key nugget of knowledge or information that has the potential to transform your career or your organization.

Remain Healthy All Day: Drink a spoonful of oil every morning. Reach up with your arms and extend your body to its full height. Use a warm towel to dry the cat. Consider a philosophical idea larger than your area of expertise. Avoid getting cancer. Chalk up bad decisions to outside influences. Don't take your father too seriously. Play a game where you close your eyes very tightly, and when you open your eyes, you have amnesia and you must draw the details of your life from your surroundings. Give up smoking, drinking, and poetic verse. Remind yourself how important you are to your friends or at least your animals. Wax the floor in socks. Enter into a healthy, monogamous relationship. Consider briefly the idea of a soulmate. Light an entire box of matches and throw it into the sink. Hold a metal rod to the heavens and beg for whatever comes next.

When, one day, Kamaswami held against him that he had learned everything he knew from him, he replied: “Would you please not kid me with such jokes! What I’ve learned from you is how much a basket of fish costs and how much interests may be charged on loaned money. These are your areas of expertise. I haven’t learned to think from you, my dear Kamaswami, you ought to be the one seeking to learn from me.” Indeed his soul was not with the trade. The business was good enough to provide him with the money for Kamala, and it earned him much more than he needed. Besides this, Siddhartha’s interest and curiosity was only concerned with the people, whose businesses, crafts, worries, pleasures, and acts of foolishness used to be as alien and distant to him as the moon. However easily he succeeded in talking to all of them, in living with all of them, in learning from all of them, he was still aware that there was something which separated him from them and this separating factor was him being a Samana. He saw mankind going through life

If you cannot drop a wrong problem, then the first time you meet one you will be stuck with it for the rest of your career. Einstein was tremendously creative in his early years, but once he began, in midlife, the search for a unified theory, he spent the rest of his life on it and had about nothing to show for all the effort. I have seen this many times while watching how science is done. It is most likely to happen to the very creative people; their previous successes convince them they can solve any problem, but there are other reasons besides overconfidence why, in many fields, sterility sets in with advancing age. Managing a creative career is not an easy task, or else it would often be done. In mathematics, theoretical physics, and astrophysics, age seems to be a handicap (all characterized by high, raw creativity), while in music composition, literature, and statesmanship, age and experience seem to be an asset. As valued by Bell Telephone Laboratories in the late 1970s, the first 15 years of my career included all they listed, and for my second 15 years they listed nothing I was very closely associated with! Yes, in my areas the really great things are generally done while the person is young, much as in athletics, and in old age you can turn to coaching (teaching), as I have done. Of course, I do not know your field of expertise to say what effect age will have, but I suspect really great things will be realized fairly young, though it may take years to get them into practice. My advice is if you want to do significant things, now is the time to start thinking (if you have not already done so) and not wait until it is the proper moment—which may never arrive!

Beneath complexity, hedgehogs tend to see simple, deterministic rules of cause and effect framed by their area of expertise, like repeating patterns on a chessboard. Foxes see complexity in what others mistake for simple cause and effect. They understand that most cause-and-effect relationships are probabilistic, not deterministic. There are unknowns, and luck, and even when history apparently repeats, it does not do so precisely. They recognize that they are operating in the very definition of a wicked learning environment, where it can be very hard to learn, from either wins or losses.

Stop Telling Yourself You’re Not Ready As we noted yesterday, we fear the unknown. For example, in our personal lives, we hesitate before saying hello to strangers. We immediately call a plumber before trying to fix plumbing problems on our own. We stick to the same grocery stores rather than visiting new stores. We gravitate toward the familiar. In our professional lives, we shy away from taking on unfamiliar projects. We cringe at the thought of creating new spreadsheets and reports for our bosses. We balk at branching out into new avenues of business. Instead, we remain in our comfort zones. There, after all, the risk of failure is minimal. One of the biggest reasons we do this is because we believe we’re unready to tackle new activities. We feel we lack the practical expertise to handle new projects with poise and effectiveness. We feel we lack the knowledge to know what we’re doing. In other words, we tell ourselves that we’re not 100% ready. This assumption stems from a basic and common fallacy: that we must be 100% prepared if we hope to perform a given task effectively. In reality, that’s untrue. The truth is, you’ll rarely be 100% ready for anything life throws at you. Individuals who have achieved success in their respective fields claim their success is a reflection of their persistence and grit, and an ability to adapt to their circumstances. It is not dictated by whether the individual has achieved mastery in any particular area.

For many people, work itself is a grounding activity. Aside from providing our basic tool of survival—money—the routine of working a job according to a regular schedule can provide a basic structure that supports the life around it. This routine, while it may be drudgery at times, can actually be beneficial in its limitations. It builds a foundation. Through focus and repetition, energies become dense enough to manifest. If we are involved with constant change, we are like a rolling stone that gathers no moss. We’re kept at a survival level because we are constantly building new foundations. Only through focus and repetition can we achieve expertise in an area leading to larger manifestation of goals, be they physical or ideological.

Here’s What I Believe about Good VCs Good VCs help entrepreneurs achieve their business goals by providing guidance, support, a network of relationships, and coaching. Good VCs recognize the limitations of what they can do as board members and outside advisors as a result of the informational asymmetry they have with respect to founders and other executives who live and breathe the company every day. Good VCs give advice in areas in which they have demonstrated expertise, and have the wisdom to avoid opining on topics for which they are not the appropriate experts. Good VCs appropriately balance their duties to the common shareholders with those they owe to their limited partners. Good VCs recognize that, ultimately, it is the entrepreneurs and the employees who build iconic companies, with hopefully a little bit of good advice and prodding sprinkled in along the way by their VC partners. If VCs remain good, they won’t become dinosaurs.

During an individual's immersion in a domain, the locus of flow experiences shifts: what was once too challenging becomes attainable and even pleasurable, while what has long since become attainable no longer proves engaging. Thus, the journeyman musical performer gains flow from the accurate performance of familiar pieces in the repertoire; the youthful master wishes to tackle the most challenging pieces, ones most difficult to execute in a technical sense; the seasoned master may develop highly personal interpretations of familiar pieces, or, alternatively, return to those deceptively simple pieces that may actually prove difficult to execute convincingly and powerfully. Such an analysis helps explain why creative individuals continue to engage in the area of their expertise despite its frustrations, and why so many of them continue to raise the ante, posing ever-greater challenges for themselves, even at the risk of sacrificing the customary rewards.

A specialist might work for years only on understanding a type of plastic composed of a particular small group of chemical elements. Generalists, meanwhile, might start in masking tape, which would lead to a surgical adhesives project, which spawned an idea for veterinary medicine. Their patents were spread across many classes. The polymaths had depth in a core area—so they had numerous patents in that area—but they were not as deep as the specialists. They also had breadth, even more than the generalists, having worked across dozens of technology classes. Repeatedly, they took expertise accrued in one domain and applied it in a completely new one, which meant they were constantly learning new technologies. Over the course of their careers, the polymaths’ breadth increased markedly as they learned about “the adjacent stuff,” while they actually lost a modicum of depth. They were the most likely to succeed in the company and to win the Carlton Award. At a company whose mission is to constantly push technological frontiers, world-leading technical specialization by itself was not the key ingredient to success.

But if that were the case, then moral philosophers—who reason about ethical principles all day long—should be more virtuous than other people. Are they? The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel tried to find out. He used surveys and more surreptitious methods to measure how often moral philosophers give to charity, vote, call their mothers, donate blood, donate organs, clean up after themselves at philosophy conferences, and respond to emails purportedly from students.48 And in none of these ways are moral philosophers better than other philosophers or professors in other fields. Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.49 In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification). Schwitzgebel still has yet to find a single measure on which moral philosophers behave better than other philosophers.

An inventor's depth and breadth were measured by their work history. The U.S. Patent Trademark Office categorizes technology into four hundred fifty different classes -- exercise, devices, electrical connectors, marine propulsion, and myriad more. Specialists tended to have their patents in a narrow range of classes. A specialist might work for years only on understanding a type of plastic composed of a particular small group of chemical elements. Generalists, meanwhile, might start in masking tape, which would lead to a surgical adhesives project, which spawned an idea for veterinary medicine. Their patents were spread across many classes. The polymaths had depth in a core area -- so they had numerous patents in that area -- but they were not as deep as the specialists. They aslo had breadth, even more than the generalists, having worked across dozens of technology classes. Repeatedly, they took expertise accrued in one domain and applied it in a completely new one, which meant they were constantly learning new technologies. Over the course of their careers, the polymaths' breadth increased markedly as they learned about "the adjacent stuff," while they actually lost a modicum of depth.

You’re lucky. I wish I were so smart.” Maybe then I could graduate early and help my parents that much sooner. “Except I can’t even decide on a major.” “Why not? She blinks. “It’s hard to explain. I’m . . .” She glances away and then back. “I’m a polymath.” “A what now?” “It’s a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning. Someone whose expertise spans a significant number of subject areas. The term itself is a derivative of poly, meaning many, and manthanein, a Greek verb meaning to learn.” I stare at her. “Reese, this is amazing.” She won’t meet my eyes. Instead, she picks up the pillow and holds it in her lap, fidgeting with the fabric at the corner. “You can literally do anything.” “But don’t you see?” Her eyes meet mine, flashing in frustration. “It’s impossible to pick only one thing. Our current global economy is hyperspecialized, while I’m a student of all things but a master of none. My parents are brilliant artists. Scarlett is a brilliant chef. I am more of a jack-of-all-trades. I can’t find any one specific thing I want to learn or excel at above all others.” “Huh. I still can’t see this as a disadvantage. You’re so smart that the sky is the limit.” “But the whole point of college and picking a career is to find that limit. Isn’t it?” “I don’t know.” I never thought about it that way. “I think it’s more than that. It’s about doing something you enjoy, something you feel passionate about.

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

Although thrilled that the era of the personal computer had arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down seventy-five cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slushy snow to the Harvard dorm room of Bill Gates, his high school buddy and fellow computer fanatic from Seattle, who had convinced him to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.1 Unlike the computer pioneers before him, Gates, who was born in 1955, had not grown up caring much about the hardware. He had never gotten his thrills by building Heathkit radios or soldering circuit boards. A high school physics teacher, annoyed by the arrogance Gates sometimes displayed while jockeying at the school’s timesharing terminal, had once assigned him the project of assembling a Radio Shack electronics kit. When Gates finally turned it in, the teacher recalled, “solder was dripping all over the back” and it didn’t work.2 For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software code. “We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed building a machine. “What we know is software.” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders. “Hardware,” he admitted, “was not our area of expertise.”3 What Gates and Allen set out to do on that December day in 1974 when they first saw the Popular Electronics cover was to create the software for personal computers. More than that, they wanted to shift the balance in the emerging industry so that the hardware would become an interchangeable commodity, while those who created the operating system and application software would capture most of the profits.

Dr. Sherman VanMeter has made a career of unpacking the densest areas of scientific endeavor in accessible—if not polite—terms. You’ve written books on everything from astrophysics to zoology. How are you able to achieve expertise in so many disparate fields? There’s a perception that scientific disciplines are separate countries, when in fact science is a universal passport. It’s about exploring and thinking critically, not memorization. A question mark, not a period. Can you give me an example? Sure. Kids learn about the solar system by memorizing the names of planets. That’s a period. It’s also scientifically useless, because names have no value. The question mark would be to say instead, “There are hundreds of thousands of sizable bodies orbiting the sun. Which ones are exceptional? What makes them so? Are there similarities? What do they reveal?” But how do you teach a child to grasp that complexity? You teach them to grasp the style of thinking. There are no answers, only questions that shape your understanding, and which in turn reveal more questions. Sounds more like mysticism than science. How do you draw the line? That’s where the critical thinking comes in. I can see how that applies to the categorization of solar objects. But what about more abstract questions? It works there too. Take love, for example. Artists would tell you that love is a mysterious force. Priests claim it’s a manifestation of the divine. Biochemists, on the other hand, will tell you that love is a feedback loop of dopamine, testosterone, phenylethylamine, norepinephrine, and feel-my-pee-pee. The difference is, we can show our work. So you’re not a romantic, then? We’re who we are as a species because of evolution. And at the essence, evolution is the steady production of increasingly efficient killing machines. Isn’t it more accurate to say “surviving machines”? The two go hand in hand. But the killing is the prime mover; without that, the surviving doesn’t come into play. Kind of a cold way to look at the world, isn’t it? No, it’s actually an optimistic one. There’s a quote I love from the anthropologist Robert Ardrey: “We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.” You used that as the epigraph to your new book, God Is an Abnorm. But I noticed you left out the last line, “We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.” Why? That’s where Ardrey’s poetic license gets the better of his science, which is a perilous mistake. We aren’t “known among the stars” at all. The sun isn’t pondering human nature, the galaxy isn’t sitting in judgment. The universe doesn’t care about us. We’ve evolved into what we are because humanity’s current model survived and previous iterations didn’t. Simple as that. Why is a little artistic enthusiasm a perilous mistake? Because artists are more dangerous than murderers. The most prolific serial killer might have dozens of victims, but poets can lay low entire generations.

5:3 Do Not Wither within Your Area of Expertise ... But the lawyer must not allow the client to make a decision that the lawyer believes is wrong without a forceful and effective presentation by the lawyer of his or her position on the subject. When the matter is within the sphere of the lawyer's expertise, the lawyer must not permit the fear of being wrong to devour the lawyer's obligation to urge a course of action which the lawyer believes to be the best." (p.58)

The way Brad’s business works,” she said, “is that companies who are looking to expand send his agency locations where they want to go, and I don’t mean towns or regions. I mean coordinates. Latitude and longitude. Often they’ve already identified the site themselves.” “Why don’t they just buy the property themselves?” I asked. “Something about retailers not wanting to also be in real estate,” she said with a shrug. “It never made much sense to me either, but apparently it’s about showing their investors that they are staying within a particular area of business expertise and subcontracting for related services. Anyway. So a company like yours—Great Deal, right?” “Right.” “Great Deal says they want three stores in metro Atlanta in these locations and they’ll pay between one and three million per lot. Brad goes in, negotiates the deal with the property owner through a broker, ensures the land is suitable, then purchases it for Great Deal. But say he finds out that the seller will part with the land for only a few hundred thousand? He knows Great Deal will pay way more than that so . . .” “He convinces the seller to ask for a higher price and gets a cut of the extra?” I suggest. “Worse,” she said, and now her previous despondency settled back into her body so that she sagged and, for a second, squeezed her eyes shut. “He buys the land himself. Sets up a shell company under someone else’s name, then tries to sell it on to Great Deal at the markup he knows they’ll pay. A million plus profit per site.

Change Management has a very wide scope and is a relatively new area of expertise.

• Know the values, current projects, and aspirations of each person in your tribe. • Use Reid Hoffman’s “theory of small gifts” to build your relationship with people in your tribe as preparation for triading. • Form a triad by introducing two people to each other on the basis of current projects and shared values. • There’s no substitute for going through Stage Three, so that you’re known for some area of expertise. Doing so will give you the credibility to triad with others.

Though we have somewhat different training and areas of expertise, we found that we had independently reached the same conclusions about how our culture is railroading boys into lives of isolation, shame, and anger. This book’s inquiry has been guided by two basic questions: What do boys need to become emotionally whole men? And what is the cost to boys of a culture that suppresses their emotional life in service to rigid ideals of manhood?

Lots of us have expertise in particular areas. Becoming an expert in something means that we become more and more fascinated by nuance and complexity. That’s when the Curse of Knowledge kicks in, and we start to forget what it’s like not to know what we know

Sometimes authorities weigh in outside of their area of expertise. Other times they get their facts wrong, or philosophical bias distorts their judgment. The key to Rhodes Scholar is getting past the opinion of a scholar and probing the reasons for his opinions. This is the difference between being informed and being educated.

Watching Steve around the camp was witnessing a man at one with his environment. Steve had spent all his life perfecting his bush skills, first learning them at his father’s side when he was a boy. He hero-worshiped Bob and finally became like his dad and then some. Steve took all the knowledge he’d acquired over the years and added his own experience. Nothing seemed to daunt him, from green ants, mozzies, sand flies, and leeches, to constant wet weather. On Cape York we faced the obvious wildlife hazards, including feral pigs, venomous snakes, and huge crocodiles. I never saw Steve afraid of anything, except the chance of harm coming to someone he loved. He learned how to take care of himself over the years he spent alone in the bush. But as his life took a sharp turn, into the unknown territory of celebrity-naturalist, he suddenly found himself with a whole film crew to watch out for. Filming wildlife documentaries couldn’t have happened without John Stainton, our producer. Steve always referred to John as the genius behind the camera, and that was true. The music orchestration, the editing, the knowledge of what would make good television and what wouldn’t--these were all areas of John’s clear expertise. But on the ground, under the water, or in the bush, while we were actually filming, it was 100 percent Steve. He took care of the crew and eventually his family as well, while filming in some of the most remote, inaccessible, and dangerous areas on earth. Steve kept the cameraman alive by telling him exactly when to shoot and when to run. He orchestrated what to film and where to film, and then located the wildlife. Steve’s first rule, which he repeated to the crew over and over, was a simple one: Film everything, no matter what happens. “If something goes wrong,” he told the crew, “you are not going to be of any use to me lugging a camera and waving your other arm around trying to help. Just keep rolling. Whatever the sticky situation is, I will get out of it.” Just keep rolling. Steve’s mantra.

Filming wildlife documentaries couldn’t have happened without John Stainton, our producer. Steve always referred to John as the genius behind the camera, and that was true. The music orchestration, the editing, the knowledge of what would make good television and what wouldn’t--these were all areas of John’s clear expertise. But on the ground, under the water, or in the bush, while we were actually filming, it was 100 percent Steve. He took care of the crew and eventually his family as well, while filming in some of the most remote, inaccessible, and dangerous areas on earth. Steve kept the cameraman alive by telling him exactly when to shoot and when to run. He orchestrated what to film and where to film, and then located the wildlife. Steve’s first rule, which he repeated to the crew over and over, was a simple one: Film everything, no matter what happens. “If something goes wrong,” he told the crew, “you are not going to be of any use to me lugging a camera and waving your other arm around trying to help. Just keep rolling. Whatever the sticky situation is, I will get out of it.” Just keep rolling. Steve’s mantra. On all of our documentary trips, Steve packed the food, set up camp, fed the crew. He knew to take the extra tires, the extra fuel, the water, the gear. He anticipated the needs of six adults and two kids on every film shoot we ever went on. As I watched him at Lakefield, the situation was no different. Our croc crew came and went, and the park rangers came and went, and Steve wound up organizing anywhere from twenty to thirty people. Everyone did their part to help. But the first night, I watched while one of the crew put up tarps to cover the kitchen area. After a day or two, the tarps slipped, the ropes came undone, and water poured off into our camp kitchen. After a full day of croc capture, Steve came back into camp that evening. He made no big deal about it. He saw what was going on. I watched him wordlessly shimmy up a tree, retie the knots, and resecure the tarps. What was once a collection of saggy, baggy tarps had been transformed into a well-secured roof. Steve had the smooth and steady movements of someone who was self-assured after years of practice. He’d get into the boat, fire up the engine, and start immediately. There was never any hesitation. His physical strength was unsurpassed. He could chop wood, gather water, and build many things with an ease that was awkwardly obvious when anybody else (myself, for example) tried to struggle with the same task. But when I think of all his bush skills, I treasured most his way of delivering up the natural world. On that croc research trip in the winter of 2006, Steve presented me with a series of memories more valuable than any piece of jewelry.

pass across virtually all areas of public policy. As Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management gained traction, progressives began to see expertise and a professional civil service as a way to insulate policy making from corruption. During Roosevelt’s time, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act (both passed in 1906) created federal regulation of food and pharmaceuticals. Throughout the twentieth century, federal regulation would become the dominant model in a variety of areas. Aviation, occupational safety, consumer products, clean water, clean air, hazardous materials—all are areas in which the national government regulates markets to protect the public from the misuse of corporate power and to advance the public interest. Roosevelt’s incorporation law simply applied

Expertise in an area is not the same thing as infallibility.

Probably the single most reliable sign of a cult guru is that the guru claims expertise, not in one area, not even in a cluster of related areas, but in everything. The guru knows what cult members should eat, wear, do for a living; who they should have sex with; which art they should look at; which music they should listen to . . .

One of the worst disconnects of a business software development effort is seen in the gap between domain experts and software developers. Generally speaking, true domain experts are focused on delivering business value. On the other hand, software developers are typically drawn to technology and technical solutions to business problems. It’s not that software developers have wrong motivations; it’s just what tends to grab their attention. Even when software developers engage with domain experts, the collaboration is largely at a surface level, and the software that gets developed often results in a translation/mapping between how the business thinks and operates and how the software developer interprets that. The resulting software generally does not reflect a recognizable realization of the mental model of the domain experts, or perhaps it does so only partially. Over time this disconnect becomes costly. The translation of domain knowledge into software is lost as developers transition to other projects or leave the company. A different, yet related problem is when one or more domain experts do not agree with each other. This tends to happen because each expert has more or less experience in the specific domain being modeled, or they are simply experts in related but different areas. It’s also common for multiple “domain experts” to have no expertise in a given domain, where they are more of a business analyst, yet they are expected to bring insightful direction to discussions. When this situation goes unchecked, it results in blurred rather than crisp mental models, which lead to conflicting software models. Worse still is when the technical approach to software development actually wrongly changes the way the business functions. While a different scenario, it is well known that enterprise resource planning (ERP) software will often change the overall business operations of an organization to fit the way the ERP functions. The total cost of owning the ERP cannot be fully calculated in terms of license and maintenance fees. The reorganization and disruption to the business can be far more costly than either of those two tangible factors. A similar dynamic is at play as your software development teams interpret what the business needs into what the newly developed software actually does. This can be both costly and disruptive to the business, its customers, and its partners. Furthermore, this technical interpretation is both unnecessary and avoidable with the use of proven software development techniques. The solution is a key investment.

Let me do the talking, but follow my lead," said the Doctor. "You're my assistant. Your area of expertise is car mechanics." "But I don't know the first thing about cars." "Then you should be working at your local garage." "What?" "You'd fit in perfectly and earn a fortune on repeat business." "I don't get you." "That was humour, Kevin. I do it sometimes.

The percentage of leading scientists who profess not to believe in a personal God tells us little unless we also know on what they base their profession. How much do they know about metaphysics, Christian theology, and intellectual history in relationship to their particular areas of scientific expertise? The intellectual relationship between religion and science is a two-way street. Just as one ought not to place much stock in geological views of a religious believer who has never studied geology, so one ought not to give much credence to the religious views of a scientist who has never studied intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, and theology. The highly specialized character of contemporary academic life makes it perfectly possible to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics, for example, while knowing nothing about the theology of creation, metaphysical univocity, and why they matter for questions pertaining to the reality of God and the character of God's relationship to the natural world.

Put in the time. To position yourself as an expert, practice, apply, experiment, volunteer, and work within your area of knowledge to deepen your own understanding as you build real-life experience.

They are equal in nature (that is, they are both boys). Yet they are separate persons. In most cases one will submit to the other’s expertise, insight or perceived authority in the relationship. In this sense one might be described as subservient in duty to the other, at least in certain areas.

The fact that an astronomer knows so little about the inherent uncertainties in different scientific disciplines suggests to me that our current crop of pop-science icons should be largely ignored for information outside their specific areas of expertise.

Each author was assigned an area corresponding to his expertise. Jay naturally handled foreign relations. Madison, versed in the history of republics and confederacies, covered much of that ground. As author of the Virginia Plan, he also undertook to explain the general anatomy of the new government. Hamilton took those branches of government most congenial to him: the executive, the judiciary, and some sections on the Senate. Previewing things to come, he also covered military matters and taxation.

Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson argues that experts even see the world differently within their area of expertise: they see things that are invisible to a novice; they are able to discern patterns at a glance that are anything but obvious to an untrained eye; they see details as part of a whole and know at once what is crucial and what is incidental.

Mr Relokate provides exceptional moving services to the Greater Toronto Area. We promise the best and nothing less with our residential moving, office moving and commercial moving services. Our expertise means we can assure you that your belongings will be handled with care in the Toronto area, Etobicoke, Mississauga, Brampton, Oakville Burlington and beyond.

Jill Coleman, to elaborate on this topic and share some of her expertise in this area, and here’s what she had to say about not having forbidden foods: “When you *can* say yes anytime, urgency to binge dissipates. Overcoming food obsessions is about: 1) Permission (satisfaction) 2) Mindfulness I think 99% of the reasons we binge stems from feeling deprived.

Solid Eavestrough of Thornhill has provided dependable gutter, eavestrough, downspout, extension installation, guard installation, repairs, and cleaning services for Thornhill and the nearby neighbourhoods for more than 15 years. We have the skill, knowledge, and expertise to resolve any gutter, eavestrough, and downspout concerns. We provide services to residential, business, and industrial clientele in the servicing area. We are constantly learning to improve our service for our customers. We take the time to truly listen to your needs and respond in a skillful, professional manner.

Here’s the new framework: Step One: Define what you value most. Step Two: Define your areas of expertise. Step Three: Find out what people want. Step Four: Find the areas where Steps 1, 2 and 3 overlap. Step Five: Deliver value to the people!

Many reasons exist for hosting a large public event. These gatherings often feature someone famous or a local celebrity as a guest. It’s vital that the event sponsors provide adequate protection for these VIPs. Allowing someone to get too close to VIPs can hurt the reputation of the event organizers or worse. Whether it’s an obsessed fan or angry protesters, Security Services Los Angeles, CA protect your event guests and VIPs from unwanted intrusions. Guardian Eagle Security Inc has the expertise and capability to set up a secure area to host your event and actively monitor everything to keep your guests safe. Contact information 11500 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 400, Los Angeles, CA, 90064 (888) 990-0002 Info@ges.net

Keeping up with the content of accelerating change is really hard. Naturally we all share the inclination to focus on what we know, on our industry, or on our area of expertise, where we can be comfortable keeping up with what is changing. Yet trying to keep up with the content of accelerating change may actually be less important than keeping up with the context of accelerating change. There is a real difference between the content question “What changed?” and the context question “What is going on?” or “Why is this happening?

I have the greatest respect for conservation biologists. I care very much about conserving the rain forest and the wildlife in Indonesia, but I also found it disheartening. It often feels like you are fighting a losing battle, especially in areas where people depend so heavily on these natural resources for their own survival. After graduation, I decided to return to the original behavioral questions that motivated me. Although monogamy—both social and genetic—is rare in mammals, social monogamy is the norm in birds. Plus, birds are everywhere. I figured that if I turned my attention to studying our feathered friends, I wouldn’t have to spend months on end trying to secure research permits and travel visas from foreign governments. I wouldn’t even have to risk getting bitten by leeches (a constant problem in the Mentawais*). Birds seemed like the perfect choice for my next act. But I didn’t know anyone who studied birds. My PhD was in an anthropology department, without many links to researchers in biology departments. Serendipitously, while applying for dozens of academic jobs, I stumbled across an advertisement for a position managing Dr. Ellen Ketterson’s laboratory at Indiana University. The ad described Ketterson’s long-term project on dark-eyed juncos. Eureka! Birds! At the time, her lab primarily focused on endocrinology methods like hormone assays (a method to measure how much of a hormone is present in blood or other types of biological samples), because they were interested in how testosterone levels influenced behavior. I had no experience with either birds or hormone assays. But I had spent the last several years developing DNA sequencing and genotyping skills, which the Ketterson lab was just starting to use. I hoped that my expertise with fieldwork and genetic work would be seen as beneficial enough to excuse my lack of experience in ornithology and endocrinology. I submitted my application but heard nothing back. After a while, I did something that was a bit terrifying at the time. Of the dozens of academic positions I had applied to, this felt like the right one, so I tried harder. I wrote to Dr. Ketterson again to clarify why I was so interested in the job and why I would be a good fit, even though on paper I seemed completely wrong for it. I described why I wanted to work with birds instead of primates. I explained that I had years of fieldwork experience in challenging environments and could easily learn ornithological methods. I listed my laboratory expertise and elaborated on how beneficial it could be to her research group, and how easily I could learn to do hormone assays and why they were important for my research too. She wrote me back. I got the job.

Think Skeptic. Expect the first reaction of others to be negative. The forces of Complexity will inevitably tell you that something can’t be done, even if the truth is that your request simply requires extra effort. You’ll probably achieve better results if you believe more in the talent of people to work miracles than in those who are quick to provide negative answers. Don’t allow the discouragement of others to force compromise upon your ideas. Push. If you can’t get satisfaction with one person or vendor, move to another. If there was one area in which Steve Jobs had a well-deserved reputation for being impossible, this was it. He was relentless about executing ideas and demanding that people perform. Take pride in your independence and objectivity too. See facts and opinions in context. Definitely consider the expertise of those who provide counsel, but evaluate those opinions against things that may be beyond the expert’s vision—like your long-term goals. Steve Jobs knew that the short-term cost, even if it’s large, is often outweighed by the future benefit. Real leaders have the ability to grasp the context and decide accordingly. Simplicity isn’t afraid to act on Common Sense, even when it runs counter to an expert’s opinion.