April 19, 2024

Being Different, Part 5: The Long Incline of Experience

As I described in an earlier post, the Elevator of Enlightenment saves you from the Plain of Suckitude, and dumps you out on the Long Incline of Experience. For most people, this is where you will camp.

This means it is a skill that you will always have, but that you will never truly become an expert. We all have dozens, if not hundreds, of these skills. Most people will never be an expert driver, or golfer, or sewer, or baker, or any number of other things. We can do these things, but not expertly or without effort. And that’s just fine. We can’t be a master of all of our skills, or if we are, then we have few skills indeed. Because mastering a skill takes time, as we will see in my next post.

I find it odd that this is where we actually spend nearly all of our time with any skill we count our own and yet I have so little to say about it. We each must decided how skilled we wish to become in a particular skill, since for some skills we are fine with just getting by but with others we desire greater achievements. It’s all personal.

The important thing is that you feel you have some level of comfort with the skill, which sure beats the heck out of dying on the Plain of Suckitude.

Next Up: The 10,000 Hour Crest

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Roy Tennant About Roy Tennant

Roy Tennant is a Senior Program Officer for OCLC Research. He is the owner of the Web4Lib and XML4Lib electronic discussions, and the creator and editor of Current Cites, a current awareness newsletter published every month since 1990. His books include "Technology in Libraries: Essays in Honor of Anne Grodzins Lipow" (2008), "Managing the Digital Library" (2004), "XML in Libraries" (2002), "Practical HTML: A Self-Paced Tutorial" (1996), and "Crossing the Internet Threshold: An Instructional Handbook" (1993). Roy wrote a monthly column on digital libraries for Library Journal for a decade and has written numerous articles in other professional journals. In 2003, he received the American Library Association's LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Excellence in Communication for Continuing Education. Follow him on Twitter @rtennant.