Expert? Expert At What?

Do you always have to put in your two cents? There's a strange assumption floating around that being good at one thing turns a person into a fountain of wisdom about everything else. We're living through an age of outsized egos. So who exactly are we supposed to be listening to. Celebrities. The media. Athletes. People angling for office. What actually qualifies anybody to be an expert on a given subject?

And where does the nerve come from, telling another person how to live when you aren't them and have no real sense of where they stand? Perspective matters more than most people admit. Someone standing on one face of a mountain sees a view completely unlike what the person on the opposite face sees.

Advice costs nothing. Good advice is priceless. When the pupil is ready, the teacher shows up. Use some judgment before you swallow what you're handed. Don't let the whole world decide things for you. Think it through yourself. Ask what that person's track record on advice actually looks like, and ask what they stand to gain. A fair number of people operate like a ventriloquist's dummy, repeating whatever they've been fed while believing the words are their own. You see it constantly with hired experts brought into a courtroom to deliver an opinion.

People get fooled easily. Turn on the television and you'll find all sorts of figures presented as authorities. Here's something to sit with: in a courtroom, an expert gets asked for credentials, for relevant experience, and then gets cross examined on every bit of it. On a broadcast, the so-called expert is introduced by name and the credentials often go unmentioned.

When I give advice, and yes, I'm doing it right now, I know the person hearing it can take it or toss it aside. It might land for them or it might not, depending on where they are at this stage of their life. Take what I'm saying or leave it. I have nothing riding on whether you decide I'm right or wrong. Maybe it hands you a different angle on something you've been chewing on.

We build on what's already there. Rarely does anyone tear down their whole way of thinking because some fresh, contradicting fact arrived. When new information collides with old ideas, one of them has to bend. You can revise your theory of how things work to accommodate the new facts, or you can bend the facts until they fit the theory you already held.

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