Winging It
I spent all of my twenties in academic circles, completing first my BA, then my MA and finally my PhD (I’m an historian in case you’re wondering 🤓). So it will perhaps not be a huge shocker to hear that for many years, I venerated theoretical expertise. I looked up to experts in any field with awe. Heck, I aspired to be one myself and spent years cultivating expertise in my field of study.
Now don’t get me wrong, expertise is important and so essential. I certainly wouldn’t want bridges to be built or surgeries to be conducted by non-experts. But that being said, I’ve come to appreciate that not everything we do in life requires us to be experts.
And for a while, my obsession with expertise turned into a vicious procrastination cycle.
I spent all my time either worrying about not being an expert in something or reading everything I could to become one. Regardless, I ended up in the same place: stuck and not doing much. Why? Because starting meant I’d have to confront my feelings and insecurities of being a beginner (which you can read more about in my “Beginners” blog post 😉).
Instead, I've come to learn that sometimes I need more formal and theoretical expertise (in which case, go learn, girl!) and sometimes I just need to take action and wing it. And often, by winging it, I end up developing a degree of expertise along the way. Funny how that works!
Now, don’t get me wrong, I still get stuck in the expertise procrastination cycle quite a bit. I’ve just gotten better at catching myself in it and deciding how I want to handle it.
Here are a few questions I’ve started asking myself to help me figure out if more learning or action is what I really need?
Do I know enough to start and avoid some of the most common mistakes? - If yes, then just start. If no, then go research and learn about that and make a plan for how you’ll avoid them.
If I fail, what will happen? If the answer is not much, then start. If the stakes are clear, then go learn how you can better set yourself up for success.
How helpful will learning the theory be? If the answer is very important, then spend some time learning it. But with a lot of things, the gap between theory and practice can be quite big and sometimes theory is easier to understand once you’ve had some practice….if that’s the case, go get some practice.
At the end of the day, it’s ultimately all about finding the right balance. In some cases you’re going to need to spend more time studying, in other cases you’ll need to take action. Just make sure that whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it because it’s helping you, not because you’re afraid of trying.
Also, I recently spoke with Nathalie Pincham about “Winging It” on her Success Tonic podcast. Check it out here: https://www.storytonic.co/podcasts/your-success-tonic-podcast
