Member-only story
2 Curses of Being Blessed
The Lopsided Logic of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
I don’t know how to play the piano even though I have owned one for close to 5 years. But I sit at it from time to time and plonk out stuff to my own entertainment.
One day while playing an off-the-cuff song on the piano for my kids, my eldest son burst out crying. For a moment, I almost stopped because his emotional reaction was totally unexpected. But well, the show must go on, so I played on and finished the song as he cried.
After he calmed down, he said,
“Don’t ever say you don’t know how to play the piano again.”
I nodded. I couldn’t disagree with him in that state of mind. Prior to that day, anytime I played and he said, “Oh! that is nice.” I usually shrugged it off by telling him I am still a beginner, and that he needed to see professionals play.
There are two curses that burden every creative. First, is our tendency to undermine our gift because we know how much we don’t yet know. Second, is our tendency to undervalue the output of our gift because it comes easy to us. The first one is a cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that people with low ability tend to overestimate their ability, while people with average ability tend to grossly underestimate their abilities.
