I have loved to seek out experts in any field of personal interest. Most of the time I’ve been disappointed. And I’m not alone. It turns out that the people who work really hard to have a platform rarely live up to the level of influence they manage to attain.
It’s basic logic. You have only so many hours a day / week / month to research, experiment, execute, and reflect. If you spend most of your time engaged in promotion and communication, by irrevocable logic you bring less and less to the table over time.
10,000 hours to expertise? Okay, but those 10,000 hours of working in the trenches are eventually replaced by 10,000 hours of networking, platforming, and public speaking.
Eventually the wisdom gained from those 10,000 hours has been published, summarized, bullet pointed, and saturated the market. To have more to offer, more time in the trenches is needed.
We want experts like the children of Israel wanted priests and kings. It’s easier to have go-betweens who do the hard things and hand us the answers we’re looking for.
Where am I going with this? I think we’re seeing the cost of elevating people. Whether it’s a pastor, a teacher, an actor, a politician, a business person. We don’t call them idols in the 21st century, but we treat them as better-than-people people.
I don’t think humans can bear the weight of being treated as gods. We aren’t designed to carry that.
Talk is cheap. Wisdom is deep. It’s heavy. It’s costly. And it often leaves a scar.
