How To Be An Expert In Anything

In discussing Crosby Marketing’s varied government, health care and social marketing clients with a friend, he asked:  “How can you become expert in so many different disciplines?”  My answer was simple, and something I learned in my days as a journalist:  “Give me a few days, and I can become an expert in almost anything.”

How?  I just find the real experts, and they become my source of expertise.

As the ancient Chinese proverb teaches:  “A wise man learns from experience; a wiser man learns from the experience of others.”

A great example of how much you can learn from the experience of others involves the American composer Stephen Sondheim and his mentor, the great lyricist Oscar Hammerstein.  As a youngster, Sondheim wrote a comic musical about his school, and the play was much lauded by his peers.  He took the piece to Hammerstein and asked him to evaluate it.  Hammerstein said it was the worst thing he had ever seen, “But if you want to know why it’s terrible,” Hammerstein offered, “I’ll tell you.”

The rest of the day was spent going over the musical, and Sondheim would later say that “In that afternoon I learned more about songwriting and the musical theater than most people learn in a lifetime.”

Too often, I have heard the excuse, “I can’t do that, I don’t know anything about that subject.”

That is the beauty of learning.  We learn from others’ experiences as well as our own, and their experiences come in a multitude of forms – their writings, their advice, their teachings, and their day-to-day encounters with life and work. Thus, we are learning from an unlimited universe of experiences, which far outdistance our own limited world.

In my journalism days, I became an expert on a subject by going to the library and finding the right readings or the right sources to call on.  Today you can do the same thing from your seat at the computer, and expertise comes with the click of the mouse.

My point is, don’t be daunted by any knowledge challenge.  Expertise is literally at your fingertips.

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