It’s Okay to Feel Stupid Sometimes

Last updated on: August 17, 2010 at 5:19 am by JBW

It’s Okay to Feel Stupid Sometimes 2010-08-17T05:19:25-05:00 JBW

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Have you ever been in a meeting, minding your own business, maybe thinking about what you might want to have for dinner that night, when suddenly you realize all eyes have turned on you, looking for an opinion?

Except that you have no idea what they were just talking about?

It’s not that you weren’t paying attention. No, you really were trying to follow the conversation. It’s just that, well, perhaps you are new to the project. And these people have been throwing around some god-forsaken set of acronyms and industry-slang shorthand because they are all so familiar with it.

But you don’t have a clue what they were talking about, so you drifted off for a moment.

In situations like this when it seems as if I am in over my head for a moment or two, at first I get all sweaty and red in the face as I think to myself how inept I am compared to these geeks. Surely they must think I’m an idiot and a big loser from the ivory towers of downtown Corporate. And how will I ever find the time to learn all of the technical details that they toss around so casually? I even become slightly envious of these subject-matter-experts, the way they have such deep experience in the matters we are discussing, these things that I have never really paid any attention to, nor cared much about at all, up until now.

There’s a name for this, when you come to realize that you don’t know something. It’s called “Conscious Incompetence.” This condition is a step up from “Unconscious Incompetence,” where you are in a state of blissful ignorance because you don’t know what you don’t know. Therefore you don’t care.

But I have my own non-theoretical term for this conscious incompetence phenomenon, when it happens to me.

I call it, “Feeling Stupid.”

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Feeling Stupid

Conscious incompetence

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