I mentioned a few days ago how I considered a diminishing reliance on expertise as one signal that inexperience was giving way to experience. More specifically, I suggested that expertise reassures inexperienced people more so than it does experienced people. For me, the inexperienced person relies on expertise as a stamp of approval because they are otherwise unable to evaluate the quality of content. On the other hand, becoming experienced means being comfortable making such evaluations for yourself, which means you can identify good advice whether it comes from an expert or from some less qualified person in your life.
I could have paused at another point in the post to highlight a second feature of experience - consistency. I wanted to return to it today to reinforce this point. Another way to mark the shift from inexperienced to experienced is by evaluating the level of consistency. This is particularly relevant in areas where the inexperienced may sometimes produce the same quality of results as those with much more experience. If you focus on carefully chosen examples, it may seem that inexperienced people are just as capable as their experienced counterparts. However, the difference from my perspective is always revealed by the level of consistency. The failure to recognize that consistency matters is the most common mistake I notice when inexperienced people evaluate themselves. They fixate on the one or two isolated moments when they excelled, giving those examples greater weight than the many others where they failed to reach the same lofty heights, and as a result their self-perception falls badly out of synch with outsiders whose evaluations give greater weight to the full range of outcomes.
