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road to unconscious competence (Patreon)

Published:
2023-11-01 12:27:29
Edited:
2024-11-21 14:25:55
Imported:
2023-11
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Content

hello!! hope you all had very happy halloweens and welcome to november....wanted to quickly share a concept I've had rattling around in my head for the past few yearsthese are the four stages of competence (also a handwriting reveal). they outline the trajectory one undergoes towards mastery of a new skill in order of unconscious incompetence (you don't know what you don't know, peak dunning-kruger), conscious incompetence (you know what you don't know), conscious competence (you know what other people know), and unconscious competence (you know). the hierarchy matches closely my understanding of my abilities re: writing. for now I'm lodged in the tooth of conscious competence....on good, clear days, sometimes even just over the course of one line, I see a glimmer of the unconscious....and naturally on bad days I get my nose bloodied by smashing into the limits of what I know...

what do u think? do u see yourself here?

sav

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Ronaldo Knorich

Wow, I'm a beginner data analyst at my new job and it's exactly like that. Right now I'm a concious incompetent, working hard to get good at what I literally depend on to survive hahaha

Angelina

It's a very clear concept, Savannah. I myself see it as a circle or a 3d spiral, since you always learn and experience things

Dalia

i’m not sure where i would fall exactly but this is a super interesting concept! i never thought about learning a skill as like unconscious vs conscious so thank you for sharing!

Oscar Sorvick

This doesn’t really explain a sort of glimmer of competence I get at the very start of doing something. When I just start getting trained on a job, there’s a very short period, like a couple hours, where my performance is like a C, before I’m aware of all the ways I can mess up and it immediately takes a nose dive and I have to build back up to that. I can also think of a few writing projects where the kernel of where it’s supposed to go is baked into the first draft, and I lose that thread before rediscovering it. So I do think on some level, the intuition comes first before the conscious mind with its rationality and convention fucks it up in some way.

savannah brown

oh interesting, but do you think your performance is *actually* a c or are you dunning-krugering yourself....

A. Jordan

It feels like the ego could potentially trap so many at the bottom(& myself included at times) but I like to think myself alongside most people can acknowledge their place in conscious incompetence until they either want to do something about it or live with their incompetence in a particular field or path, searching for that one road that finds them yearning for competence. Then you have those that blindly excel at things like being able to create portraits of people with just a piece of paper, scissors, & millions of tiny cuts & it’s like “how did you know you’d be good at that?” Did they know? Maybe there some sort of inkling that drew them to this niche skill

Dan

Model is perfect, you could 100% sell that if you cared to. could equally be applied to things like social competencies

Leetelite

I remember reading a book concerning the concept of "praxis" and the learning/mastery of skills (no, I don't remember the name of the book, so this is going to remain a vague void of "dude, just trust me, some very cool and authoritative person said this"). In that he drew the analogy of learning to tie one's shoelaces. A lot of us don't need to think about it, and if given the task we'll trivially do it... However, if we're to explain to someone else how we're doing it some of us will have great issues with it. Hell, some of us will not even be able to tie our shoelaces when we think of what we're actually doing! It is similar (at least in my experience) to putting in a code for, e.g. your debit card. You might not remember the code, but when put in front of the card reader your finger just presses away and voilà! . It seems to follow a process where first you have to be very deliberate about what you are doing; you have to consciously think about what your fingers are doing, and what code you're actually putting into the machine, because you don't have any experience. Then, your body learns the pattern. You no longer have to think about it because you do it "automatically". This is where we stay in most pursuits, because it's sufficient! Then, when we have to go one step further for some reason, e.g. because you have to teach someone else your skill, you have to reintegrate the skill with your conscious perception; you have to be aware of what you are doing to tell someone else about it! This also fits my experience with the feeling of mastering a skill. So basically, I agree with the hierarchy, and I think there is another layer on top, which is returning to conscious awareness of what you are doing! . Arguably, learning could be a constant back and forth between your conscious and unconscious, where being deliberate comes first, doing something automatically (or intuitively, for what is intuition except "knowing" without having the words for it? I.e. the feeling of knowing without the associated conscious awareness of that which you know!), and then returning to conscious awareness when you ask yourself "hey, when I'm doing this thing, what am I actually doing?". It's almost like the unconscious is running away with the knowledge and the conscious goes "hold up, slow down, I need to check whatever that is so I know we're not doing this wrongly or don't know what the hell we are doing, and so we can communicate about it.". It's almost like the ladder goes: don't know - know that you don't know - you know what other people know - you know - you know that you know (I've now written "know" so many times it no longer looks like a word.). And hey, maybe the ladder has even further rungs, such as knowing that you know that you know! . Well shit. This turned out longer than expected! Thanks for this little thought nugget, I apparently felt like I had a lot to share on it, more so than I thought! But hey, maybe that's just my conscious awareness lagging behind my unconscious knowing!

Gregg Cooke

TL;DR: This is another way of looking at the Dunning-Kruger curve. When I explain D-H to someone I always end up breaking it into four stages and two turning points: the idiot stage, the early learning stage, the "midpoint of doubt", the humble stage, the "wall of imposter syndrome", and, finally, mastery. These are basically the steps in your pyramid. The idiot stage is right at the very bottom of the curve, where you've just heard about some new topic and you "intuitively" jump right in with no awareness of what you're doing. A lot of people don't leave this stage. Those that realize they actually need to learn something start climbing the curve. You start off not knowing what you don't know and therefore have nothing to measure your progress to. Every new accomplishment seems like mastery...until someone else shows you the limits of your knowledge. It's a cycle of arrogance: "gee, I just learned this new skill -- I must be competent!....oh shit, I'm not done learning that yet..." Eventually the real "oh shit!" moment happens and you suddenly doubt everything you've learned and realize that you don't actually know what you need to learn. That's the midpoint of the D-H curve and some people never push through this point, out of fear or whatever. On the other side of this midpoint, you know what you don't know and you become able to openly learn from others. At some point, the amount of things you're learning from others outweighs the amount of things you're learning on your own with little outside help. You're at the point where you know what other people know; also you're able to learn equally from a master or a novice. OK, so by now we've worked through your first four stages. The wall between them and the final stage is imposter syndrome. I don't know of anyone who hasn't achieved mastery without experiencing imposter syndrome. It's the feeling that everyone is going to realize you're a fraud, that you just appear to know what you're doing but you really don't. It's another "oh shit!" moment like the midpoint of doubt. There are three reactions to imposter syndrome: (1) push through it and achieve mastery (intuitive competence), (2) never push through and live your life in doubt (yet still highly skilled...lots of people are here)...(3) or step onto a higher-order D-H curve (sort of like "the advanced class" of the topic you're learning). Note that the imposter syndrome never goes away -- but you can get over it (reaction 1) or let it stop you (reaction 2)...or accept it and leverage it to drive you to higher highs (reaction 3). How did I learn this? From 35+ years of watching my fellow software developers and architects...and from 18 years studying Zen. These are essentially the same steps that a Zen practitioner goes through to achieve any degree of enlightenment (and there, reaction 3 is the only valid option).

Gregg Cooke

Two details I forgot to mention: Everyone starts in idiot mode though for many people it lasts just minutes or hours. Also, if you've reached imposter syndrome, you're also unconsciously competent. I believe that imposter syndrome arises when your awareness of your competence slips, because that competence has become intuitive, and your analytical brain interprets that to mean "you just got lucky, you aren't really skilled" or somesuch.

The String Puppet Workshop (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-07 20:00 It's great that you're analyzing this! Unconscious competence, or as I call it "mastery", is something that I look to attain in everything I do. Through what I've seen, however, there is a greater level beyond unconscious competence. It's a level of superhuman capability that I like to call "mastery that surpasses mastery." It's something you can find in street food artists: https://youtu.be/OEbEykfN1zM?si=XtpfRJr3pSSlEJia This "god level" is something I aspire to in my puppetry and sculpture work.
2023-11-01 15:02

Nathan Elling

I'd say between conscious incompetence and competence for my songwriting, since that's my main creative endeavor. I think the music (melody / harmony) is approaching competence, but the lyrics are somewhat incompetent, only in flashes actually opening doors to the imagination to paint a scene, or capturing a mood strongly enough to really have it sit with you. Each subcomponent has it's own pyramid, which makes it hard sometimes to point to exactly what is holding you back. I know my sensory writing abilities lack, but I don't know how they pair with my general use of rhyme / consonance / assonance vs word choice / style vs metaphor / symbolism, and how to harness these outside of some arbitrary feeling of lining things up like I'm getting a combo in a match-3 game. Cool rhyme, cool metaphor, etc, but where does that go? There's no point score saying you made a work of art that actually lands for someone.

bailey bayer

I have found myself consciously or unconsciously engaged with all of these behaviors at one point or another, especially in the last year. I put on a music event where I performed for over an hour and had a conversation in between the two sets, which was so fun but very ambitious, and I was certainly a little overconfident in my ability to pull it off in a proficient way. Definitely a blend of unconscious incompetence and conscious competence at play here, however that might work. It was the dream that I had in my head for a long time coming to fruition and I proved to myself that I could do it, but there was a part of me that was certainly more confident than prepared. When I find myself organically sliding towards other passions against my subconscious desire to just work on music all the time, I feel that it's my unconscious competence at work, because I know I should make space for many passions in my life, and that I am inherently more adept at writing than other creative mediums

Danielle Brown

it was for precisely this reason that carl jung didn't like the term "subconscious"—because, as he put it, there's nothing "sub" (or under) about the unconscious at all. if anything, he said, consciousness is like an island, that emerges from beneath the vast sea of the unconscious, in which all things "live, and move, and have their being" and to which all things return. so, in that sense, oscar, (and if I'm understanding what you've said here), I've found that my best/favorite poems and/or lines/images come from a place that i most decidedly would consider "not me." it's that place from whence all enduring art arrives, i'd suppose… other times, you're right: i find myself editing and wrestling the life from what maybe i could only partly understand and/or glimpse. i think that's what's so maddening for me about writing poetry—that attempt to honor the numinous…and then, hopefully, the experience of an ecstatic rush, humbling awe, and emotional shakedown when you realize you've just been visited by and in the presence of what otto rank called "the mysterium tremendum."

Zuzanna Madzinska

I don't get it. It feels too simplistic to accurately describe the stages of acquiring new skill. What is the point of the model (not in a contrarian sort of way. I genuinely need more context lol) ?

Kira

that clicky moment when i catch myself being consciously competent is a slippery high that i chase constantly

Abby VandenBerg

Definitely agree. I’ve become very conscious of this transition in my life where everything suddenly became easier. I show up to work and I just know what to do and I’ve finally become an asset to the team, not just a learner. Same with my community advocacy life. I tell people who have noticed how much more happy and confident I am and tell them it’s like I could feel the moment my frontal lobe fully develop (but it’s that I’ve been successfully learning and growing for 3 years but that doesn’t sound as fun)

nofunwhatsoever

i’ll use this to make myself better at fortnite

Mellio_Jellio

I'm pretty confident in what I don't know. I'm situated squarely in the middle of this pyramid in all I try to do~

Mellio_Jellio

the first tier reminds me of when I was learning the XX's "Islands" with the video game Rocksmith. With the way Rocksmith walks you through the song in the beginning, I felt so confident despite not even playing half the notes (my kurger was so dunning so hard). I was super unconscious of what I was missing, only focused on what I did know. Eventually I'd finish the little course in Rocksmith so I could play 100% of the notes on that track but wow.... Looking back, I felt so cool playing so little...

Mellio_Jellio

Is it because skills are so multifaceted that a model this 2 dimensional can't quite capture that without some tweaking maybe? Or something else?

Joe

To me, I don't believe there can ever be a true unconscious competence. The unconscious tends to be the place where many negative thoughts come from (that voice in the back of your mind). You can tell yourself over and over not to think bad thoughts, and you can even suppress them, but that usually results into the negative thoughts bursting over and flooding the mind at a certain point. What I've done is to slowly train those thoughts to see all the possible ways things can realistically go wrong then instead of dwelling on those thoughts, I will use them as a tool to prevent as many wrong things from happening in the first place. This also aids in helping me to know what else I need to learn to further master something, and it can increase the speed of learning curves. Whenever I learn something or if I'm being trained on a job or task, I always wondered and thought about all the many ways things went wrong when something was originally being created. For example, everytime I see safety hazard signs or "what not to do" lists, I think of all the possible events that likely happened that caused the creation of the safety list, it might be morbid but I've always been that way. It's like my mind is hardwired to see, know, understand and comprehend the backend of anything. I also say all this because in my view, there isn't true mastery of anything without having a comprehensive understanding of what you do and why it's to be done the way you do it. I don't believe there can be a true unconscious competence because there is always an exception, there is always something unknown that can come up and I've never liked the idea of believing I "know" something in whole. It's more like, "this is what I know right now, but always be open to the possibility that I don't know all and anything has the potential to change".

Matt Baron

Sick video. I was just thinking something similar, but I'm not sure if it's a "god level". Because once you have "mastery", you can comfortably settle into knowing that you have right intuition. However, you don't yet know that there's an even higher level. So I think the pyramid reiterates itself indefinitely. You know how you sketch evergreen trees by stacking overlapping triangles on top of each other? Like that, I'm thinking the unconscious competence of the preceding level is actually the same thing as the conscious competence of the next level. My real-life example of this is every time I feel like I've improved myself as a person, I will end up viewing that version of myself as cringe in 3-5 years down the road.

savannah brown

this is nice danielle thank you. 'mysterium tremendum' wow. i got asked after a talk recently how spiritualism impacts my work and i had no answer for them and wanted to think about it more..this feels adjacent to that...

Toby

Yeah this checks out. It looks like a very logical, internal framework to align yourself with in regards to learning a new skill for those whom have the foresight and humility to keep their ego in check, but I can definitely imagine some people being too lost in their own sauce (dunning kruger) to reconcile with the fact that they objectively have the wrong intuition, indulge in their own overconfidence that stems from the deserved but small dopamine-induced W's in the grand scheme and are ignorant to adaptively learning, especially when the skill itself is easy to learn but hard to master. However, that could oppose the question to the other side of the spectrum which might sound paradoxical even. How cognitively advanced and free-flowing do you have to be to refine your craft to the human limit of the right intuition, fencing on the definition between analysis/intuition or wondering if imposter syndrome even comes into the equation, when there is nothing to be gained or known from other people on a similar trajectory where they could hold a retainable nugget info to improve that one subsidiary weakness of the skill itself that you fall behind in? Or even just an ideology that connects with you? Ultimately, with or without other influences, it could all come down to the day-to-day experience that determine your ability in the present and all the factors of life that add up greater to the sum of it's parts. I don't know if I have the most nuanced take (or if it makes fucking sense 😂) but those are my two pennies on this atm. Definitely an interesting concept with equally interesting responses to read through. A lot of really thought-provoking ideas here. Thank you for sharing and I hope you had a Happy Halloween too Sav!

Toby

this guy knows

Black_Cat

Is that a HIERARCHY???????

Zuzanna Madzinska

I dont think its a dimentionallity issue. This model seem to work for brain heavy skills (reading, maths, etc.), but even then when I was at uni I'd learn a tool/method/approach for solving a problem (concious competence), forget it and manage to ratain the intuition few months down the line. Also some things one learns are just simillar so transfer of skills happens that for me doesn't really follow the pyramid.

Liam Xavier

I feel like I often get in my way enough that my naturally enabled unconscious competence is sabotaged by my belief that I can't just "let myself write" in an unconscious manner hence being too conscious and ironically becoming unconsciously incompetent

rinion

as a regular resident of the border between conscious incompetence and conscious competence in a couple things (drawing and singing and honestly some corporate-life skills), i do overall enjoy the pyramid. the way it closes toward the top being indicative of how few things you can ever really reach or maintain unconscious competence with. (edit: i forgot patreon does the "Enter key instantly posts the comment" thing i had more to say but in a different paragraph—) the thing that stands out to me as non-intuitive under this representation, though, is how you can have different stages of competence for the same skill in different areas. for art, knowing one's way around colors or composition or anatomy more than other areas; for the things they call "hard skills" in the office, or school smarts, internalizing a process vs being able to convey that verbally or through writing, the difference between performing under a well-defined structure and schedule and performing without that. maybe that's me reading too much into what this is supposed to represent, though.

alice

i feel like this is why it's important to embrace being new to a skill. if someone goes through that period where they don't know anything telling everybody they Totally Know What They're Doing they are going to miss out on a lot of good learning time. maybe it's just a lack of self awareness or embarrassment (this is my camp, i usually feel like i am already so far behind for some reason. so i think i may as well just shut up and figure it out..) but i guess maybe the whole pyramid speaks to how important it is to always be (atleast trying to be) self aware. it's something i think i learned the importance of after middle school but i know some people never really figure it out at all. i am excited to see how the terminally-online zoomers fare. there will be some nights for me (in terms of creative writing and maybe fighting games when i was younger) where it feels like everything i say or do is gold. this is the time i get the progress i can coast off of later, in elo or word count. but most of the time, creatively, it is just a lot of shiny garbage. garbage in content but stylistically interesting, atleast that's what i think. it's probably mostly garbage to other people. so i'll just have really minimally interesting things to say. i won't get much done, and what i do will be kind of bland. i know that creativity can't be a nonstop stream.. but it bothers me how sporadic it feels like my brain really turns on. as i continue my life i'd really love to figure out what works for me better. so i guess for me i would say i am content unconsciously on a blue moon. when i can stop worrying about the words and the words just make sense. some days i can guide myself into conscious competence. but most of the days i spent consciously incompetent. staring at a wall of shit and thinking wow nice throw ! but really as i continue to do these things every day i feel my grip getting stronger. glad to have to so much time to spend. it is only a matter of time.

WhoeverTheHeckThatWas

I learned unconscious competence through one lecturer at uni. He made me really good at falling asleep.

Augustus

Maps onto the 4 functions of Jungian Personality (MBTI)

Bear

thought I knew what I knew about knowing what I know but after reading the comments I don't know anymore...

Bear

at each plane of the pyramid there should be an opening to a small duct that runs all the way down through each level and opens into a small inverted pyramid attached to the bottom labelled 'self-conscious obliteration'

Danielle Brown

oops! apologies: it was actually Rudolf Otto who coined the term (although otto rank also speaks of it in many of his writings). and, yes, savannah, i'd think this "adjacency" with what we call spiritualism might be something akin to the very creative urge/impulse itself. maybe sorta like those cave drawings & paintings that our ancestors took time to make—despite the fact that, moment-by-moment, they strove for their very survival—almost as if to create isn't at all "optional" for humans (and, dare i say, perhaps the evolutionary process itself?).