Are you as awesome as you think you are?

We all have our blind spots. For certain skills — perhaps our ability to do maths, drive a car or see business opportunities — we may not…

We all have our blind spots. For certain skills — perhaps our ability to do maths, drive a car or see business opportunities — we may not be as awesome as we think we are.

This is the result of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a physiological bias whereby the more incompetent someone is the more confident they are in their abilities.

In short, the less awesome you are the more awesome you may think you are.

This is why most of us would rate ourselves as above average drivers. Or why at a certain company over 40% of the software developers believed that they were in most skilled 5% of the developers in the company.

The same Effect also goes the other way. Sometimes exceptional people fail to see their brilliance.

To overcome the Dunning-Kruger Effect and build more accurate evaluations of your level of skill we need to keep learning, and seeking and considering feedback from other people.

Once we overcome a critical level of knowledge in a subject we go from thinking we are experts to knowing that we are just scraping the surface. By asking for true and honest feedback from others we start being able to benchmark our knowledge, skill and competence against theirs.