I’M NOT AN ANTHROPOLOGIST or a psychologist (or any kind of -ologist, for that matter), but I’m confident that over the past, say, seven thousand years, people have placed value on the ability to do things at a high level. This is to say that throughout history people witnessed someone doing something cool and thought either, I have to learn how to do that or I want that person on my team.
The idea of impressing others, of proving oneself through a demonstration of skill, is why the concept of Mastery still inspires people to be great at things. Unfortunately, there are several drawbacks to developing skills in our current age, the most notable of which is that it’s time-consuming. To spend 10,000 or 20,000 or however many hours it takes to Master the violin comes at the cost of living—feeding, clothing, and sheltering oneself—during all those years of practice.
It also comes with the cost of forgoing the pursuit of other skills, such as building software platforms or becoming an AI prompt engineer or whatever the next trendy, promising thing will be. This choice presents a serious risk because as tastes change, all the time you’ve invested in a skill can become financially irrelevant if the audience ceases to remain willing to pay for it. And then you, the violinist who spent a decade or more gaining Mastery, end up either having to start a new career or play Pachelbel's “Canon in D Major” every weekend on the wedding circuit.
Another significant drawback is that the more refined one’s skill becomes through Mastery, the more esoteric it often becomes, which naturally limits the audience who can appreciate it. (See: Jazz.)
Giving It Your All, For Less
Within any field, some people are valued more by peers than they are by wider audiences. The writer’s writer, the comedian’s comedian, or the person about whom other musicians say, “I’m not sure why she’s not more famous.” For whatever reason, it requires the trained ear of another practitioner to fully value what they do and how they do it.
This presents a paradox for practitioners: They want to believe that as they become more skilled, they also become more valued and sought-after. But if the majority of people don’t have the ability to understand or value that skill, then there’s some level they reach in which the more expertise they develop, the less it helps them financially. The violinist, for instance, can study for decades and end up grinding out the wedding season—meanwhile, teenage pop stars become millionaires with music that could be written and performed with a few weeks’ practice. Maybe even richer if they invent a dance to go with it.
To ground this in a real situation: A couple years ago, I cracked my car’s bumper, and I asked my local Dodge dealership what it would cost to replace. The dealer told me $1,200, which seemed ridiculous. So I went on eBay, found a bumper for the late-model Dodge I own, and ordered it for $250. Then I took the bumper to a local auto-body shop and they put it on for another $140. I saved myself $810 because bumpers are not complicated and it was only a minor inconvenience to take those extra steps.
A year later, though, my car stalled in an intersection, and when I took it to a mechanic, I was told that my cam sensors needed to be replaced. I had no idea what cam sensors were or what they did. Further, I had no idea what replacing them should cost, whether the mechanic would do a good job, or even how to assess a mechanic’s cam-sensor-replacement ability. All I knew was that stalling ain’t safe and that the mechanic didn’t seem like a horrible person.
The mechanic did a thing. The car stopped stalling. And I can appreciate that on a basic level. But there was nothing satisfying about the service because I still have no idea what he did, the level of skill necessary to do it, or whether he did a good job. Now I’m left waiting for the next thing to go wrong, at which point another mechanic might look at my cam sensors and say, “That work was done by a genius” or “Whoever installed these had no idea what they were doing.”
Sure, I could’ve paused everything else going on in my life in order to study cam sensors for a few weeks, but the cost of that would’ve been more expensive than just trusting him—and there was no guarantee that research would’ve helped. It might’ve only annoyed the mechanic.
In this case, I was the untrained audience, completely detached from the value of the work or what it cost. And I bring it up to highlight how, as the division of labor grows more specialized, we’re all becoming an untrained audience to more and more of the situations and people we encounter. This might be good for efficiency, but it presents a significant challenge for valuing products and services.
I’ll venture further and argue that in many businesses now, executives have become an untrained audience for what their employees are doing and the quality those employees are capable of achieving. Instead they tend to focus on the cost of those employees and revenue—that is, margin.
To that extent, executives have no incentive to value or foster Mastery. The more a company relies on high levels of expertise, the more leverage the employees have and the more on guard executives have to be about the possibility those employees will get lured away. This is not only expensive but it makes the company vulnerable to changes in technology, the number of competitors who can copy their innovations, and the potential for expertise to grow stale in the marketplace.
What we see is that when a company relies on highly skilled employees, they adopt all the modern drawbacks and assume all the risks we outlined when talking about the violinist pursuing Mastery: the high cost, the potentially smaller audience, and an over-dependence on a fickle marketplace.
This is not only awful for a company’s margin but also its morale because people who fancy themselves experts always want more, which might sound like a character flaw but is more the result of Picasso’s Napkin—which we’ll explore next.