Welcome back! Hope everyone had a good new year.
One of the things most people fight against is impostor syndrome - the unshakable feeling that you don’t know what you’re doing, that you’ll be caught out. And it’s often the case that the most capable people feel it the most - so most of us consciously fight against it and try to build confidence where we can.
But it’s easy to go too far and confuse familiarity with capability. We spend time around lots of complex subjects and we work hard to stay informed and current - we learn the vocabulary of our teams and companies, we understand the outlines of the technology, we sit in meetings and hear decisions being made.
It’s easy to confuse familiarity with competence. When I was studying math, I saw this all the time - it was easy to look at a math problem and think “I can solve that”. About half the time, that was correct - usually it was harder than it seemed. Proof is the only…proof.
Another way to think about this is languages - you might be around people who speak a language that you don’t speak. You might understand a bunch of things about that language - how it sounds, how it looks when written, even some of the words. But you would fail if you actually tried to speak it. It’s easy to do this with technological subjects too - things like ML and crypto are easy to understand in the abstract without really getting into detail in a way that is usable.
It’s ok to just be familiar with complex subjects - and often, cursory familiarity is useful to making decisions and understanding choices. In fact, this is a requirement for becoming more experienced in tech - there’s just too much to know everything in detail, but you still need to understand the implications of things you aren’t working on directly. So this peril is ever present - optimize your attention (always) but be careful not to fool yourself that you understand things better than you really do.