7/ This tells me that I have some way to go.
This leads me to something I’ve been toying with: I think the vocab point is a good initial goal to have. It’s a solid waypoint on the way to mastery.
What do I mean by this?
Conversation
8/ At the bottom of a skill tree, you might say “oh I want to get to mastery”. But what does mastery mean? It’s usually not clear.
Worse, mastery tends to be skill-specific. (In the fighting arts, John Danaher proposes it’s “you can give a good fight to a top 25 fighter”)
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9/ The vocab point, on the other hand, is pretty universal.
It is thus a good first goal because a) you have to be decently good to create your own vocab, and b) you are able to see the levels of skill above you, and therefore the diminishing returns to effort to get there.
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10/ Side note, how do you know that your vocab — the nuances of the thing you’re noticing — is valid? A: talk shop with another practitioner of a high skill level.
They might not have the exact same vocab, but they’ll be able to grok quickly if what you’re saying is valid.
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My favourite example of this is the Wired video series of 'X explains one concept in 5 levels of difficulty'.
Take this example of Jacob Collier, for instance. By the time he gets to jazz legend Herbie Hancock, it's ALL vocab point shop talk.
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12/ Interestingly, the vocab point often becomes the end goal for some of my skills.
Take Judo, for instance. I've long made peace with the fact that I cannot reach mastery. (I'm in a race against my declining physical ability).
But I think I can get to the vocab point.
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13/ I want to be able to watch Olympic level Judo and really understand the chess game that occurs before a throw or pin happens.
And I think I can get there with a decent amount of hard work. (Mastery, on the other hand, would likely require a decade or so of 100% focus).
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14/ Other useful implications of the vocab point:
When you're listening to two experts talking shop, the vocab they use can become a map of the skill domain, even though you can't see it yet. This was what I was getting at in
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15/ Another implication: when someone uses cliched language / well-known categories to describe their skill, you can probably guess that they haven't reached the vocab point yet.
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Replying to
Agree with much this thread. But an edge case: unscrupulous people often use novel vocab to signal competence they don't have
"Data strategist", "Content technologist", and "Internal journalist" are novel self-descriptions I recently heard from utterly vacuous people
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Replying to
I think you can hear the difference between jargon and the difficulty of describing skill. For instance, your superpower is really in making oblique, lateral moves when finding data to support or disprove a hypothesis. You will absolutely struggle to articulate this subskill.
Whereas 'data strategist' is just jargon, and you can quickly sidestep this by pushing them on the actual nature of their skill.
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