Chauffeur Knowledge, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and Breakthroughs
A couple of months ago, I finished reading Charlie Munger's book, Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger [1]. Besides Charlie's excellent point of view about using mental models to navigate and thrive successfully in this world, I read one concept that kept my mind thinking about it since then. I thought there was something missing and I just recently realized what it was. What I’m talking about is the chauffeur knowledge story Charlie included in his book, and how he used it frequently to resonate with people. However, one caveat is he didn't know if the story was even real or apocryphal. Paraphrasing the story a bit, it goes as follows:
Somewhere, there was a scientist so famous the only thing he did was tour around the country and give science presentations about the topics he was really good at. At each presentation, he had a chauffeur who would drive him and stayed with him at each talk he gave. After some time, since the talk was the same, the chauffeur memorized it. Out of boredom, the chauffeur asked the scientist if he could give the talk pretending to be him, and also to introduce him to the audience as his chauffeur —in short, to exchange roles. Strangely enough, the scientist agreed. At the next event, he played the role of the scientist introducing himself as such. Just after he had finished giving the talk he had memorized, and when the people were about to start asking questions about the subject, he said: "thank you everybody, now my chauffeur will answer your questions". Then, the actual scientist stepped in, and answered all of the questions.
After finishing the story, Charlie explained the takeaway: "Whatever you do in life, never be the chauffeur". Suggesting we should stay away from overestimating our abilities when we have limited competence in a subject. For me, that's wrong. I truly believe there is a very fine line between not knowing what you’re talking about (i.e. being ignorant), and someone who achieves a really important breakthrough. I believe the very fine line relies on some part of the intersection of three things: the chauffeur's traits, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and being a child again.
Let's start with the chauffeur's traits I think Charlie probably underestimated. First is having a genuine interest in a subject along with a great motivation to understand its dynamics. Second is the courage and willingness to be judged and mocked by others. Third is the confidence to debate and question everything. Lastly, the curiosity to keep questioning everything, to ask better questions, and to expand our circles of competence.
The Dunning-Kruger effect
Wikipedia defines the Dunning-Kruger effect as, "...a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities" [2]. If we put this as a graph, the vertical axis would be our confidence, and the horizontal axis our current competence. Unsurprisingly, when we realize we know little about a subject we thought we were competent at, our confidence drops to its lowest point leaving us discouraged and incompetent at the same time, and because it's hard to get out of that stage, most people stay there. There’s where the chauffeur's traits get in like an aid to help us to start climbing the competence slope. Equipped with it, it’s easier to acknowledge our ignorance on what we don’t know, and to confront it by understanding the underlying dynamics of the subject.
Regardless of the subject, most of the time the farther we climb the competence slope the more we’ll start finding interesting problems, blockers, and many unanswered questions. Therefore, to keep climbing the competence slope we’ll need to start questioning everything to form new ideas, hypotheses, and solutions to problems that couldn’t have been discovered yet. There’s where being a kid again plays its part.
Being a child again: Don't stop asking and questioning everything
I think curiosity, inventiveness, and dreaming about impossible things becoming possible in our minds diminish drastically as we grow, like a spark losing its brightness. In consequence we started taking everything for granted, because it’s easier. I strongly believe the culprit relies on the fact we simply stopped asking and questioning everything. Otherwise, we’d expand ourselves in an immeasurable way. I know very few people who've grown and still keep those traits with them.
As we climb the competence slope, and we apply these child-like traits we start seeing interesting inefficiencies, fragmentation, and overlapping. In doing so, it separates us from industry biases, and from the status quo; therefore, helping us to see them more clearly, and surfacing even more inefficiencies. It rapidly becomes inevitable to start daydreaming about different ways on how things can be improved. When that happens, it feels even illogical why nobody has seen them before, and also why no one has solved them already.
What is left is coming up with hypotheses aimed to solve them. How excited we are is how far we’ll go and how much of an impact we can make. Pushing ourselves further will only increase the quantity of hypotheses to test, more questions to answer, and more problems to solve. Even though sometimes we’ll end up in a dead end, other times we’ll end up getting to a breakthrough.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Poor-Charlies-Almanack-Essential-Charles/dp/1953953239,