In season one, episode two, we cover the Dunning Kruger effect. What the Dunning Kruger effect does is that it takes a graph and compares your confidence level in a given activity to your experience in that given activity. The x axis, the horizontal axis, is your experience, and the vertical axis, the Y axis, is the confidence piece. If we start moving from left to right in experience and as we move off the bottom left corner of the chart, we actually see a massive spike in confidence with just a small amount of experience. This is called the peak of Mount stupid. The reason for this peak in confidence is that even though we have very small amount of experience, we really think we can do this, and we do not even know what we don’t know yet.

As we start moving farther to the right, as we gain more experience, we see a huge drop in confidence. Think of this like coming out of school, getting your first job being really ready to go, you are ready to take on the world. As you start to have more experience, you actually have a lot of humbling events. These events drag you down into the valley of despair, where you have more experience than ever, but your confidence is very low. When you are in the valley of despair, it is easy to regress back to the peak of Mount stupid. The reason for this is that it is scary down there. You actually need to have low confidence and a lot more experience before you start to see the slope back up in confidence.

This reworking, regrouping, and getting your feet back underneath you while regaining confidence is called the slope of enlightenment. Eventually, if you can continue to push that slope of enlightenment back up higher, your confidence levels creep up back to the maximum. Combined with all the experience in the world, this is called the plateau of sustainability which is where the experts live. The best way to picture this is to Google it and just look at the Dunning Kruger effect graph. My job is only to put this in front of you so that you can get excited about it just like I am.

To recap, as you move from left to right on this graph, picture, you will see a big spike like the letter A up to the peak of Mount stupid and then right back down to the valley of despair. The tail of that A then flattens out and starts to turn upward again over that slope of enlightenment. The slope of enlightenment then curves off and eventually flattens out over on the plateau of sustainability. If you draw a little person there, that is your expert with a high amount of experience and a high amount of confidence. This concept is applicable in so many things in our lives, whether it is our relationships, our careers, our parenting, literally anything. It is a new skill that you are developing. Everything goes through a natural evolution similar to the track of the Dunning Kruger effect. Find us online at blank screen.us or email me at blank screen.us@gmail.com. We will see you in the next episode!