On a good day in a kitchen, you really can't tell who plated what. Whether it's the chef or the line cook, the food looks the same, it tastes good, and everything moves along just fine.
It's only when something breaks a missing ingredient, an oven that won't heat up, or service that's running late that you begin to see who's really steady. That's when experience, not just skill, quietly shows up. We assume knowledge because we've consumed something about it. But that's very different from having lived through it. Or having spent time with it long enough to understand the messiness of it. It's where we realise that experience really matters.
Recently I found myself in the middle of a conversation on a topic I had surface-level knowledge of at best. But for some reason, I was defending my stance like I knew exactly what I was talking about. It was only later that I caught myself and thought - what was that about?
It reminded me of something from Adam Grant's book Think Again. He talks about how when our understanding of something is shallow, we sometimes cling even harder to the idea that we're right. It's not confidence. It's a way of covering up how unsure we actually feel.
That moment stuck with me and got me thinking about this in the context of how we're consuming knowledge now.
There's no shortage of information. Summaries, explainers, threads, key takeaways - everything has been condensed for speed. We're surrounded by things that promise to make it easier to understand something in less time. And most days, it feels like a gift. There's just too much out there to read and watch and catch up on. So we take the shortcut.
I saw a post with a "TL;DR" the other day and had to look it up. It made me feel a bit out of touch. But also, it made me pause.
Are we learning things, or just learning how to talk about them?
Because it's easy to feel like you've grasped something after a 15-minute video or a podcast summary. It's enough to sound informed in a meeting, or throw in a few lines in conversation. And maybe that's all that's needed sometimes.
But I keep coming back to the chef and the line cook analogy.
When things fall apart, when a project slips, or a client is unhappy, or a plan stops working, do we actually know what to do? Or are we stuck, hoping someone else in the room knows better?
This isn't a criticism of summaries or shortcuts. I use them too. But I'm learning to tell the difference between having information and having depth.
The Antidote
So here's what I've been trying to do consciously, to avoid falling into the trap of thinking I know more than I actually do.
I've started using summaries and threads the way a menu works. It helps me decide what's worth exploring. But it's not the meal. If something catches my attention, I try to go deeper. Read the book. Take the course. Sit with it. Apply it. See what breaks.
I've also found it helpful to keep coming back to first principles. To ask simple questions like "Why does this work?" and "Do I really understand this or am I just nodding along?" That pause alone often tells me what I need to know.
There's a big difference between reading about resilience and building it. A line cook might know the definition. A chef has lived through failure, taken a breath, stood back up, and come away with something they didn't have before.
Real understanding usually doesn't come wrapped in clean language. It's built in the mess. In the application. In the trying and the failing. And then trying again.