Ep 93 | Discovering Your Circle of Competence and Improving Your Decision Making w/ Brian Gubernick

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Let's get into today's topic. Today I want to talk about the circle of competence, and I'm gonna start with a quote by a gentleman named Thomas Watson. Thomas said, "I'm not a genius. I'm smart in spots, but I stay around those spots." I love this because it's a great summary of the circle of competence. What is Thomas saying? He's saying, listen, I'm not a genius. I just know what I know, and I know what I don't know, and I stay in those spots where I'm an expert. I stay in those spots that I know. And as a result, I probably appear to be a genius to some. The circle of competence is a, is a fairly obvious concept, but one that I think oftentimes we ignore or neglect. Maybe our ego causes some of that. See, when ego and not competence drives what we do, what we undertake, we end up with blind spots. If you know what you understand though, then you know where you have an edge over others. When you're honest about the knowledge you're lacking, you know where you're vulnerable, where you're exposed, and where you can improve. So understanding your circle of competence improves your decision-making and improves the likelihood of, of positive outcomes. So there's really not a definitive checklist for figuring out your circle of competence. I think as you're— if you're thinking about this concept right now and you reflect on your world, your business world, your personal world, given what I just shared around, around competence, knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know, you probably could figure out a couple areas in your life where you'd say, you know what, I'm very competent in this respective area. And then there's probably some other areas where, let's call it what it is, maybe that your ego is, is making you believe, or you're at least putting out to the world that you know what you're talking about. Maybe you do have a lack of understanding and you're operating outside of your circle of competence. If you don't have at least a few years and a handful of failures under your belt, in that respective subject, odds are you, you're probably not competent in that particular area. An example of this: for most of us, climbing Mount Everest is probably outside our circle of competence. Not only do we have no real idea how to do it, but even more scary, if we attempted it, we don't even know what we don't know. So if we studied hard, I guarantee we could figure out the basics, right? Like we could figure out the training, the food, the gear, the process, the time of year. All the things an outsider could quickly know. We could read all about it. But at what point would you be satisfied that you knew enough to get up there and back with your life still intact? How confident would you be in this assessment? There are unfortunately hundreds of bodies across Everest of people that unfortunately, again, thought that they could go up and down and make it back alive, and they did not. Now, those that do make it, what do they have to do? Well, most of them, if not all of them, have to rely on specialized knowledge, on an expert, on somebody that works in their circle of competence, and those people are known as the Sherpa. And the Sherpa are indigenous to the region, they grew up in the shadows of the mountain, and they're uniquely placed to develop a circle of competence necessary to get to the top. So the point being, you can learn and read and study, but you still may not be competent. Competent. Everest is an extreme version of that. So how do you know when you have a circle of competence? Within our circles of competence, we know exactly what we don't know. So let's just pause on that one. When you think around your circle of competence, or an area where you think you are in fact competent, do you know what you don't know? Like, honestly, can you, can you define exactly, here's what I don't know If so, that's a step towards identifying if you in fact are in your circle of competence. Like, you're clear on what's missing. You're able to make decisions quickly and relatively accurately if you're in your circle of competence. You've got detailed knowledge of all the additional information you might need to make decisions with, with a full understanding. You might even know what information is not attainable. You know what's knowable. You know what's unknowable. You can distinguish between the two. If you're in your circle of competence, you can probably anticipate and respond to objections because you probably heard them before, or you've already put in the work of gaining knowledge to counter those objections. This kind of goes back to at least a few years under your belt and a few failures had. When you're in your circle of competence, you have a lot of options when you confront problems because you have a deep fluency in these subjects that you're dealing with. It also means you could draw on different information, uh, resources and understand what could be adjusted and, and, and what can't be adjusted. Now, a circle of competence can't be built quickly. It doesn't happen overnight. It isn't the result of attending a few classes, or reading a few books, or even working at something for a few months. It requires a heck of a lot more than skimming the surface. It's not a static thing. It's something you attain over over the course of your life, and the world is dynamic, so this knowledge has to be updated on a fairly regular basis. This keeps your circle of competence one that's actually alive and well. Become static and you become incompetent. So there's 3 key practices needed in order to build and maintain a circle of competence. Number 1, curiosity and a desire to learn. Number 2, monitoring. And number 3, feedback. So let's go back to curiosity and a desire to learn. Number 1, you've got to be willing to learn. And learning comes when experience meets reflection. So you can learn from your own experiences, or you can learn from the experiences of others. You can read books, you can read articles, you can have conversations. But learning to the extent that you become competent is costly and it's slow, and you're only one person. So learning from the experiences of others is productive, but it takes time. You've gotta always come from a place of curiosity. When it comes to monitoring, the number 2 thing you need in order to build and maintain a circle of competence, you need to monitor your track record in areas where you want to develop a circle of competence. You have to have the courage to monitor honestly so the feedback can be used to your advantage. The reason we have such difficulty with overconfidence is because we have a problem with honest self-reporting. We don't keep the right records because we don't really want to know what we're good at and what we're bad at. Ego is a very powerful enemy when it comes to a better understanding of reality. So we've got to monitor. Lastly, you must occasionally solicit external feedback. External feedback. We need others to tell us their opinion of our level of competency. This helps us build that circle of competence, but it's also very critical for maintaining that circle. Now, operating outside of our circle of competence, how do we go about doing that? Well, we've got to operate outside of our circle of competence. I know many times we say, okay, if you're not, if you're not the specialist and you got to hire for it, or you got to leverage it, and sure, that is a tactic, that's a strategy. But there are things where, where we're going to operate outside of what it is we truly know to the level I'm describing here. You've got to, in my opinion, if you're going to operate outside of your circle of competence, you've got to at least learn the basics of the realm that you're operating in while also acknowledging that you're just a stranger in this land, right? Like, you've got to be aware. You got to have self-awareness here. So you've got to at least learn the basics, number one. And then number two, you've got to talk to someone whose circle of competence is in the area that you desire. You've got to learn, I would say, how to fish versus just how to receive a fish. A good example of this, operating outside of a circle of competence, would be Abraham Lincoln. Who in 1860, he put together a cabinet of all of his competitors. After his election, he selected 3 of the people that ran against him, and he brought these rivals into his cabinet so he was forced to contend with opposing ideas. And he was able to harness this, this range of opinion, opinions that were different than his, strive or drive towards a top, a very common goal. So they always disagreed, oftentimes they disagreed, this cabinet he put together, but they were the best minds to look at things from all different perspectives. So let's wrap this up because we've gone on a little while about the circle of competence, but I just think it is such an important topic to be thinking around. Your focusing question: what are you competent in? What is your circle of confidence? What areas are you not competent in right now that you should or could be working on and striving to become competent to the level I'm describing? And lastly, those areas that are outside your circle of competence, how are you dealing with them? Are you outsourcing? Are you leveraging? Are you gaining a degree of knowledge So you are more intelligent around these areas, though not the expert just yet. This is a big self-awareness concept, and I encourage all of us to look in the mirror today and assess our circle of competence. That's all we have for today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.