I mentioned yesterday that as your expertise grows, the options that you see tend to shrink. Instead of viewing all possible options for a given situation, you’re able to quickly narrow down to the most likely.
Related is your ability, primarily in your area of expertise, to notice small changes that others might miss.
A good example is graphic design, where I tend to have a pretty poor eye. A few years back, our team had a website pulled up on our big screen, and our graphic designer immediately said “why do those two paragraphs have a different font?“. I literally couldn’t see a difference between them, but she was right — there were two very similar but slightly different fonts being used on the site. It would have taken me a while to track that down, but her deep familiarity with fonts helped her to quickly notice a problem that would have taken me (and many others) far longer.
The complexity of the WordPress dashboard
I noticed a similar phenomenon on a video call with a client last week. They were sharing their screen related to a problem they were having with their website, and I immediately saw the source of the issue. This wasn’t some intellectual triumph, but just the fact that I’ve seen the WordPress dashboard hundreds of thousands of times; I tend to glaze over most of it, but I can notice right away when something is amiss.
In their eyes, there were dozens of links and options and craziness on the dashboard, and they were right. To me, though, most of it looked perfectly “normal” and I tuned it out, and the issue is what jumped out right away.
This can apply to almost every profession and it’s what makes solid people worth paying for. If my furnace went out, I could conceivably find the right manual and spend a few hours going through part-by-part to try to figure out what’s wrong. However, if I called a pro to take a look, they’d likely notice within seconds “hey, it looks like your thermocouple is misaligned” and we’d be good.
Familiarity can be boring, but can make you better at what you are. The more time you spend learning something, the less you need to spend fixing it and the greater value you can be to those you serve.
