# Chapter 150

People expect you to be the expert. And you actually may well be, but the chances are, that you aren’t. I mean people expect you to be the expert in EVERYTHING! And you aren’t. Neither am I. I woke up this morning and had 13 text messages from a good friend. He was wanting me to help him make a decision about his next computer purchase. Now I have a doctorate in leadership, and 60 years experience in living, but I have no education nor expertise in computers other than using them hard for decades. But people still expect you to know everything, so I usually give them my opinion and preference and frame it as such, because while I do have an opinion and preference that does not make me an expert! You aren’t an expert either! My dad expects me to be an expert on everything because of my scholastic degree, but the world of knowledge is far far too large for any one person to know everything. In fact if you can become an expert on one tiny sliver of knowledge, then you have accomplished a great deal.

A doctorate in any subject just means that you know the most about the least tiny thing in the whole world. Not at all that you know everything about anything. And any Dr worth his or her weight in lead keeps learning constantly because the knowledge that they learned in their pursuit of knowing the most about the least tiny thing in the whole world, keeps expanding! The real experts are the ones who keep learning and the ones who know that they don’t know everything.