How to become an expert
Spend some time working out what you are an expert in. If you laugh and say “nothing!”, then throw a glass of water over yourself – that kind of thinking will get us nowhere. If you are doing anything that people are paying you money for then you have some form of expertise. If you are baking vegan cakes then you know about measuring out ingredients, how to test different mixes and how to test if a cake is ready in the oven yet. That might seem like such simple stuff to you, but to someone like me who has never baked a cake in my life, you are an expert. If I was in a crisis situation where I had promised to bake a cake for Lisa’s birthday, it’s your videos and articles I would be binge-consuming. Don’t give me someone showing me complex recipes and advanced decorating techniques; I want someone who can teach me how to take the cake out of a tin without it falling apart! Whatever you know will be of value to some people.
Let me tell you a funny story. I have marketing-based degrees and qualifications, I spent 20 plus years helping companies with their marketing, I’ve run my own marketing agencies, I’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the world, I’ve helped write college courses and was even a regional board member for The Chartered Institute of Marketing. When we had the idea to write this course on marketing I STILL had a panicked moment where I thought: “but what do I know about marketing?! It’s obvious stuff that everyone already knows, right?!” We all forget, or take for granted, how much we know.
You have experience that you have built up over time. It might be all those hours in the gym or all those days sat at a computer learning how to do something that you now do every day without thinking about it. All those years cooking for your family. These give you a base to start from and, more importantly, a developed skill set meaning that you will learn more advanced knowledge quicker than someone who’s a novice. So if you have spent years baking and you now want to become an expert in making gluten-free cakes, it doesn’t matter if you know nothing about gluten-free baking. It’s only going to take you a short amount of time to learn to the standard where you will be able to teach someone else how to do it.
Experts come at all levels. What I would want to learn about cooking is completely different to what Lisa would want to know. My cooking extends to throwing everything into a wok and hoping for the best. Lisa wants to know how to improve on the micronutrients and nutritional values, she wants to know how to replace oil and make the base ingredients from scratch. She will read Dr Michael Greger to find out more about nutrition, and then watch YouTube videos on advanced knife skills. And it might be that you start off as an expert only to novices, because there’s room for that, but you bring them on a journey with you as you deliberately increase your expertise.
