There’s a difference between having a plan and changing it, and never having one at all.
— 6th Uncle
I was twenty-one years old when my uncle said that to me in Minnesota, and I’m still thinking about it now, more than three decades later. When he laid these supposed pearls of wisdom on me, I’d been driving aimlessly around the country right after graduating from college. Understandably, my father must have been concerned about whether I knew what I was doing, so I knew I’d have to hear a whole lot of something even before the visit with my uncle, who happened to be traveling through Minneapolis on business while I was there to visit a friend and pay homage to Dylan.
I enjoyed that wandering burst of my youth, but the only thing that I’ve been turning over in my head ever since is what the heck my uncle was really trying to say. For the purposes of this brief post, I’m going to skip three decades of contemplation, and just write down what I hope it means:
Early in my career, I heard about the four levels of competence — listed here from worst (1) to best (4):
- Unconscious Incompetence
- Conscious Incompetence
- Conscious Competence
- Unconscious Competence
I’m not going to describe these levels here, there’s plenty of material elsewhere that explains these levels better than I could. To me, when I heard about those levels, and for a long time afterwards, I simply could not believe in that fourth level. I thought it was just something that old people pretended to exist, because they couldn’t remember how things worked. How is it possible to be unconsciously competent?
Now, however, I simply know that this level exists, because I understand the simplicity of the insight: if one has consciously ingrained competent practices and corresponding ethical behavior into one’s habits, the result will be as competent as both those practices and adherence to those ethics. You’ll be pleased with your competence, and no one else’s opinion really matters as much. That’s you plural: your teammates all need to be on the same page regarding your practices and ethics too, or the result will eventually become extremely unpleasant unless you just happen to be lucky enough to never need the awesome power that comes from Unconscious Competence.
I mean, there’s probably a better way to say all that, but I’m trying to be precise about it, rather than saying it more briefly. It took me too long to understand that this is what is meant by “Unconscious Competence,” and it would take too long for me to try to say this all more clearly.
But … I think we could come at this from another angle …
This kind of navel-gazing was invented, for the Western world, by our old friends So-crates and Plato.
Socrates is perhaps the most famous name in Western philosophy, and famously never bothered to set pen to paper when it came to his philosophy — he wasn’t illiterate, he simply believed that deep human meaning could not be transcribed. The only way to transmit any truly valuable human meaning was directly from one human being to another, without anything in between to mix the message, without any mediation. And that includes: without any mass media, not even our first mass media, writing.
Plato, on the other hand, was a helluva writer and a smart guy with his own thoughts to add to those of his most famous colleague. And there you have it: two of the biggest names in Western philosophy, fundamentally divided by an extremely important and current philosophical question about whether human meaning can be conveyed through mass media without losing everything important about being human.
I never really had a dog in that fight, but these days I’m leaning towards So-crates, insofar as how I’d ideally live my life. Sure I’m writing on this here personal mass media blog, but I’ve thought for years and years that writing’s not for me, other than as a tool to think. Now we can all see that truthful writing has lost so much of its power in today’s mass media, and Socrates had a great point about the importance of communicating truth from human to human.
Because of the internet and all it hath wrought? Well, yes — but don’t get me wrong, I still think technology can turn around its recent trend, and begin to work for humans again. I know it’s a good thing that Plato decided to write.
But in my personal musings, I’m with So-crates just because Unconscious Competence is something I’ve observed from time to time in others, if not often enough in myself. (I mean, sure I’d like to see it more in myself and others, but that seems unreasonable given that there are, after all, four levels.) And when I see it, when I see someone succeed just because of consciously designed practices and corresponding ethical behavior that become habits — it’s really funny to watch what happens next: Those people get asked, “How did you become such a success?”
And really, the person just can’t give an answer that seems to make sense to a lot of people, because the truth is that a whole lot of what they did was just Unconscious Competence, and there’s no good way to explain that. They just live it, and someone else writes it down if they happened to notice — but that someone else always adds their own humanity, and that’s a good thing too. Maybe we can all be Socrates and Plato; certainly neither could have become who they were without the other.
Originally published at http://blog.ginsudo.com on October 31, 2023.
