Quotes About Expertise

You have to get comfortable [with your work], you really have to know what you're doing, and it has to be almost boring to you to be able to do it well.

What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession.

Skilled labor teaches something not to be found in books or in colleges.

no job, no matter how lowly, is truly 'unskilled.

I don't want to expose the intricacies of my work so people can understand how I did it.

I think Joan's advice would be: always know more than anyone else, always be discreet as possible. And never cry at work.

Almost everywhere men have become the particular things which their particular work has made them.

Each one to his own trade; then would the cows be well cared for.

Right after the keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the iPod Shuffle, I went backstage with one question in mind: What makes an iPod an iPod? By then - January 11, 2005 - I had staked my own claim to iPod expertise, having written a 'Newsweek' cover story about Apple's transformational music player, and I was writing a book on it.

I know Steve Kerr well and his basketball IQ is really high. He knows everything about basketball.

I stick with what I know, makeup-wise.

I know sound, and this is what I'm going to stick to: what I know.

You can't just stick someone's name on a headphone that doesn't know anything about sound.

Acting is like roller skating. Once you know how to do it, it is neither stimulating nor exciting.

We would much prefer to see ownership in the hands of the Maple Group, if only because we would much rather see Canadian ownership of our stock exchange. What we are first of all interested in is making sure that Montreal is able to preserve that niche or expertise.

Buying only what you know can end in disaster. Just think about Enron's employees and business partners, the 'locals' who bought lots of its stock because they thought they were in the know.

If a doctor said you had stomach cancer, would you consult Rush Limbaugh for a second opinion? Of course, that sounds like nonsense, but many Americans have no qualms about listening to political commentators and untrained activists when it comes to even more complex scientific questions.

It was so strange. I knew that Josephine Baker had performed on the same stage but that night I felt it. Many of the same people who worked with Josephine Baker are still here. They know what they're doing. And that was a very comfortable feeling.

There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.

Figure out what you do, then do it. And do it better than anyone else. And then let everything else you do build around that; stay with what you know. Being great at one thing doesn't mean you can also run a restaurant or a car dealership or a line of sportswear. Bill Gates is not going to launch a line of sportswear. Most likely, neither should you.

Mastery is a journey, not a destination. True masters never believe they have attained mastery. There is always more to be learned and greater skill to be developed.

It is possible to know all there is to know about a subject—medicine, for example—but if you don't have M.D. at the end of your name, few will listen. The M.D. is what I term a "credibility indicator." The so-called expert with the most credibility indicators, whether acronyms or affiliations, is often the most successful in the marketplace, even if other candidates have more in-depth knowledge. This is a matter of superior positioning, not deception.

Y el 99,9 por ciento de las veces no era porque no supieran disparar un arma,

Career specialists can't externalize what they've internalized. Second nature is hard to teach.