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In this video, I'll teach you how to become an expert in any field or subject that you want. Doesn't matter if your goal is to get high grades, or learn a new language, or play the piano. If you want to become an expert, you have to go through something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. And it's named after the researchers Dunning and Kruger who published this research. Now, the Dunning-Kruger effect can be broken down into three distinct stages. And the reason most people don't achieve their goals is because they get stuck in the first two stages, which leads to a lot of stress and frustration and disappointment. But by the end of this video, you'll understand all three stages of the Dunning-Kruger effect, so you can work out which stage you're on and, more importantly, how you can successfully progress to the next stage. So let's start with the first stage, called the climb to Mount Stupid.
This stage is by far the most dangerous stage. If you look at all the people who failed to achieve their goals, most people failed because they couldn't move past this first stage. So I'm going to spend some time to help you understand why this stage is so dangerous and how you can push yourself through it. The easiest way to understand the stage and why it's so dangerous is using something called the Dunning-Kruger graph. So all three stages of the Dunning-Kruger effect are defined by the same two variables: confidence and skill. Confidence refers to how confident you feel in your level of skill or expertise; this is purely subjective. On the other hand, skill is how good you actually are at something; and this is objective—you can actually perform and get results that show it. So let's say to achieve our dream goal, like getting top grades and then entering into our dream career pathway, we need to have a level of skill that's somewhere around here. But when we're first learning and trying to improve our skills to to reach this goal, we're in the first stage of the Dunning-Kruger, and so our skill level is all the way over here. And so what happens in this stage one is that our skill goes up by a small amount, but our confidence shoots up rapidly. So we call this the climb to Mount Stupid because we're very confident without being very skilled. The peak of Mount Stupid is right here. And by the way, I don't know who made these names, but they are absolutely savage.
So obviously, being in stage one, the climb to Mount Stupid, is a very dangerous place to be if you want to achieve your goals, because you definitely do not have the skills necessary to achieve your goal, but you believe you do. You are way overconfident; we essentially don't know enough to realize how much we don't know. And I see this all the time in learning skills and learning to learn, where someone watches a few videos or reads some articles about using flashcards or active recall, and then they have supreme confidence—like they think they've got learning completely figured out, even if in some cases they're still not actually that successful yet. But here is the dangerous part about stage one and being on Mount Stupid that you need to understand: it's not just a fact that you become overconfident. The problem and the danger is that most people will get to this point, the peak of Mount Stupid, and they just stay there; they stay unskilled and overconfident. But why? Why do so many people get stuck here? Well, it's because of something that researchers call the dual burden of incompetence. The dual burden of incompetence means that you don't have the skills to achieve your goals, but you also don't know that you don't have the skills to achieve your goals. And what that means is that your skills stop improving at stage one. After all, if you are really confident in something, then you have less motivation and you're not as open-minded to learn more about it.
So the question is, how do we move past stage one? Because obviously we need to get our skills all the way through to there to achieve our goals. Well, the first way is what happens to most people, which is that you stay overconfident, and then you continue to fail, and you fail and fail and fail so many times that you realize, surely you must be missing something, and your confidence is forcibly cracked open. Or there is a less traumatic way of achieving this, and that's with a technique called a premortem analysis. And using a premortem analysis can help you to move past stage one without needing to repeatedly fail. So what is a premortem? Well, a postmortem in medicine is an examination that doctors do on someone that's deceased to examine the body and figure out the cause of death. A premortem analysis is where you assume something terrible has happened, and then you ask yourself why it happened. The technique was created by a cognitive psychologist called Gary Klein and published in the Harvard Business Review in 2007 and has since been used all over the world. And by assuming that a disastrous outcome has happened and then writing down all the reasons that may have happened, it forces us to challenge our assumptions and challenge our beliefs; it takes confidence out of the picture. Sure, you're feeling confident about your study skills and you think you're going to do well on this exam. Let's just say that you didn't do well—why might that be? And often when we're on Mount Stupid and we do a pre-mortem analysis, it's very difficult to even think about why we might have failed. This is actually a good thing because it forces you to then have questions that you explore. For example, if all you're doing is like active recall flashcards and then you don't do so well, and then you think about why, then you now need to learn, okay, well when do flashcards not work so well? In what situations are they helpful, or in what situations are they actually harmful? What other strategies might I need that I haven't been thinking about that I need to actually succeed? What are the other barriers that are in place that I might not be thinking about? An expert that really knows this stuff can answer those questions. But by exposing that gap of knowledge and by asking and answering these questions, our skill and knowledge slowly grows.
This process is by no means quick or easy. For me, when it comes to learning to learn, I made a lot of very heavy mistakes trying to move through Mount Stupid, which I really want you to avoid, which is why I created a free weekly newsletter where I share tips and advice to help you grow in less time than it took me. Again, it's completely free, so if you'd like to sign up, I'll leave a link for you in the description. Now, as our skills and knowledge eventually grow, we move through into stage two of the Dunning-Kruger effect. And stage two is where we have better skills—life is good, problems are solved, we're feeling happy. Now just kidding. Uh, stage two is probably where you're going to lose all hope. In fact, stage two is actually called the Valley of Despair. So yes, you fall off Mount Stupid into the Valley of Despair. Savage names, I know. And so the Valley of Despair is where we're becoming painfully aware of the gaps in our knowledge, and so as a result our confidence plummets. But this is actually a great sign because it means that we've moved past the most dangerous point of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the climb to Mount Stupid. And even though it doesn't feel like it, our skills are actually better than they were before. So the danger here in the Valley of Despair is just not understanding this and then giving up, which is the saddest part, and it happens to a lot of people. They start thinking, I've been studying and working on this thing so much for so long, how do I still suck so much? And in my experience, this happens a lot to people that are halfway through their PhDs. But if you are set on achieving that big goal, then you do have to push through that dip in confidence.
The question now is, if you're feeling unconfident, how do you know that you're in the Valley of Despair or if you genuinely just like are not very skilled at something? Well, this is actually very easy. There are two signs. First of all, is the time spent. If you're in the Valley of Despair, you probably spent at least a moderate amount of time immersing yourself in this, studying and working on it. This is usually in the span of months or even years. Now, the one exception to this is if you've received a lot of coaching. For example, in my learning skills program, people often reach stage two in roughly one or two weeks, and that's because they're actively finding the mistakes and weaknesses much more quickly than they normally would in natural life. It's the same for sports coaching as well. When you've got someone that's watching you and actively pointing out the mistakes, you will progress and learn about where your gaps are 10 to 20 times faster than just figuring it out yourself. And the second sign is your actual confidence, or rather the trend in your confidence. If you're in the Valley of Despair, you will probably remember having felt much more confident about this before, and that as you learned more and got deeper into it, you felt that your confidence came down. So if you take those two boxes and you are in the Valley of Despair, what I want to say to you is: keep going. You are doing well; you're on the right track. I personally, when it comes to learning to learn, spent years in the valley. It took me years to overcome Mount Stupid and get to the valley, and then I spent years in that. What you are feeling now is a part of the journey of becoming an expert. And right now you may think that there are so many gaps in your skill and knowledge, but remember, once upon a time you didn't even know enough to think of those gaps.
And if you want to keep pushing through this stage, you have to keep learning. And what better way to keep learning than with this video sponsor, Shortform. Shortform gives you book summaries and guides on thousands of the most popular books. They have chapter-by-chapter analyses, which a lot of other apps have, but the real power comes in their commentary and analysis section. This is where they actually take the concepts from that chapter or from that book and then they compare it with other similar books in that field or even just wider research. And as someone that usually knows the research—like when I read a self-development book, I know the research it's based on—I'm genuinely impressed at how they're able to connect all those things together. It'll even tell you if there's a concept in a book that disagrees with the wider research, so that you can be more skeptical about it. It saves a lot of time, and it helps you keep an open mind while you're navigating through Mount Stupid. I've been reading How to Change by Katie Milkman, which is a book on how to use evidence-based psychology to create positive behavioral change, and it's already given me a lot of new things to think about. If you want to give it a go yourself, you can use my link, shortform.com/Justinsun, and it will give you an unlimited free trial on thousands of books as well as a 20% extra discount on an annual subscription. The link's in my description if you want to sign up. Now, once you push through stage two, you enter the third and final stage, which is called the Slope of Enlightenment. And in this stage, congratulations, you can finally say that you are an expert. This is when we have that growing level of confidence, but we also have that level of skill. And for complex skills, including learning to learn, it takes years and years to get to this stage. And if right now you are all the way back here, then you probably don't even need to get all the way to the end to achieve your next goal—like you don't need to be a Nobel-winning physicist to do well in your next physics exam. In fact, actually, just smash your next immediate goal; you might only need to increase your skills to somewhere around here. But if your ultimate goal is challenging, like living your dream career, then you will eventually, with time, need to move through all three of these stages. And what's important is not just getting to stage three as quickly as possible; what's important is progressing through the stages without getting stuck and without giving up.
FYI, for me, I've spent now over 11 years reading learning science research and coaching tens of thousands of people, and really dedicating my life to becoming the best learning coach I can be, and I will probably put myself somewhere around here at the moment. It's probably like another 10 years before I get to somewhere like here. But I do have to mention something about these stages of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it's a little controversial, which is that some people will say that everything that I've talked about in this video—the Dunning-Kruger effect, the graph, all the stages—is that it's not real. They say that the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn't exist. Why do they say that? Well, they say it's because the original research by Dunning and Kruger in 1999 doesn't show this graph. And I have a confession: they're right, kind of. The original research from 1999 does not show a graph that looks like this. In fact, the original research has a graph that looks a little bit more like this. And no one actually knows where this graph that's so popular now came from, or who gave these savage names. But ironically, I think that the people who make all these videos saying that the Dunning-Kruger effect isn't real might be on Mount Stupid about the Dunning-Kruger effect. Cuz if you go and read even more of the dozens or even hundreds of studies that were conducted in the last 25 years since the original paper was published, which I have read a lot of, you'll see that this Dunning-Kruger relationship, where people overestimate their confidence and aren't very good at assessing their real levels of skill, has been found repeatedly in multiple studies, especially when it comes to learning to learn. And so while I admit that this graph and some of the things that I talked about have been simplified for social media, the concepts and the stages are things that have been backed by a huge body of research over the years. FYI, the research is pretty complicated, so if you want me to go into it in more detail, let me know in the comments. But if what matters to you is achieving your goals and building your skills, then it is also practically safer for you to believe that the Dunning-Kruger effect is real, just in case you fall into an overconfidence trap. Because at the end of the day, I want to, with these videos, help you to become a more confident learner, but not an overconfident learner. You need to see your gaps and mistakes to really achieve your goals. So those are the three stages of becoming an expert. And to help you on your journey, here's another video that I recommend to help you keep progressing through the three stages of the Dunning-Kruger effect.