Expertise Recognition Quotes

I’d like you to know that almost all of the directors I have met over the years have been decent, likable and intelligent. Nevertheless, many of these good souls are people whom I would never have chosen to handle money or business matters. It simply was not their game. They, in turn, would never have asked me for help in removing a tooth, decorating their home or improving their golf swing. … We are all duds at one thing or another. For most of us, the list is long. The important point to recognize is that if you are Bobby Fischer, you must play only chess for money.

Dilettantes appreciate the work, professors the master at the same time.

A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it…. Along the same lines, people who aren't talented in a given area tend not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from co-workers to politicians. This may impede the democratic process, which relies on citizens having the capacity to identify and support the best candidate or policy.

Usually companies hire me, and they know full well who I am, and that's one of the reasons they want to hire me.

I know what I know and I also know what I don't know, and I make sure I hire the right people who can teach me.

Careers in virtually all academic disciplines are fostered by being a superstar who knows more about one subject than anyone else in the world.

Having a Nobel Prize or being a famous scientist will get you a week to a week and a half, metaphorically speaking, of a hearing for your new idea, but after that, it's going to tank if you don't have the evidence and support for it.

People who know your work and know your personality, they know your strengths and weaknesses. A director like Guillermo del Toro, he knows more about me than I do. I trust him when he tells me what part I'm going to be playing in something, because he's envisioned that that can only be done by me. He knows it.

If we're able to identify our own ignorance, we can identify someone else's expertise. We learn how to listen to each other. And that is the foundation of human understanding.

The professionals resemble and recognize each other by virtue of the stigmata that their trade has left upon them. They are like the dog in the fable, whose collar has made an indelible mark around his neck. The amateur is the shaggy wolf whom no dog had better trust too far.

All professionals, whether physicists, economists or musicians, live by and for peer judgment, even when they are being paid by people who cannot tell the difference.