Confidence, Expertise, and the Things That Should Be Easy

Does anyone else find themselves with a high degree of confidence in things they should probably be wary of, while totally lacking confidence in the things they’re objectively experienced at?

Because this strikes me all the time.

As I’ve mentioned before, I likely have my “10,000 hours” in both photography and video production. Add in editing, years of field work, and all the weird problem-solving that comes with trying to make things look good in bad conditions, and I should probably feel pretty solid in that world.

And yet I still show up to shoots wondering if I know what I’m doing.

Then I’ll do something like tear down my mountain bike to swap a cassette, or replace the AC system in my truck, full of confidence and ready to make the project happen, only to be quickly humbled by some random problematic encounter that reminds me I am not, in fact, a professional mechanic.

I started thinking about this the other day while working on my mountain bike. The components were old, and I haven’t done a great job of maintenance after sandy trail rides, so the chain was stretched, the cassette was worn down, and it was time to swap parts.

Simple enough.

Until it wasn’t.

Once everything was reassembled, I ran into the actual problem, which was getting the derailleur tuned back into the right position. It didn’t help that this is a 12-speed conversion on a bike frame that was built before 12-speed drivetrains were really a thing. The tolerances are tight, and I just kept messing up the process.

A bunch of YouTube videos later, I got it squared away.

But it took way longer than it should have.

Which is usually how these things go. You start with a little too much confidence, bump into the part you didn’t know you didn’t know, and then suddenly your “quick repair” becomes an evening of muttering, rewatching the same tutorial, and wondering why a barrel adjuster has the emotional power to ruin your day.

I guess that’s a solid example of what people often mean when they talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect. The stuff I don’t know that much about can feel deceptively simple from the outside, especially when I understand the general concept and can follow a guide.

And to be fair, I usually can figure these things out.

I’m good at logic problems. I’m good at puzzles. I was always pretty good at building things, taking things apart, and getting the general idea of how systems work. I’m not useless around tools.

But there is a huge difference between understanding the concept and having the earned confidence that comes from repetition.

That’s the part I keep running into.

Because with photography and video, I often underestimate the skill involved because the decisions feel normal to me now. Seeing light, building a frame, knowing when audio is wrong, knowing when a scene needs a different angle, knowing when a shot is almost there but not quite, those things feel like part of the operating system at this point.

So I downplay them.

I tell people I’m not as good as they say I am. Part of that is probably healthy, because I’m comparing myself to the best of the best and I don’t want to walk around acting like I have nothing left to learn.

But part of it is probably less healthy.

I think I struggle with having a pretty big internal ego while presenting myself as someone with almost no ego. The sometimes, internally, I’ll call myself absolute garbage, then the next time I make something I’m genuinely proud of, I’ll swing the other direction and think I’m a genius. Then a few days pass, I look at the thing again, and I’m back to, “man, I suck at this.”

Very stable. Very normal. Nothing to see here.

But there is something in that contradiction that interests me.

Because when something is easy to us, we often assume it should be easy to other people too. And when something is easy to someone else, we assume it should be easy for us.

That’s where the trap is.

A mechanic says a repair is easy, and I think, “Cool, I can probably do that.”

A photographer says lighting a room is easy, and someone else thinks, “Cool, I can probably do that.”

But “easy” is often just expertise with the hard edges worn down.

It’s easy because someone has done it enough times to know where the problems hide.

It’s easy because they’ve already made the dumb mistakes.

It’s easy because they can feel when something is slightly wrong before they can even fully explain why.

That doesn’t mean the thing is actually simple.

It just means the person doing it has built a relationship with the work.

This is where the confidence question gets weird for me. I’ll be deeply cautious about the work I’ve spent years doing, because I know all the ways it can go wrong. But I’ll approach something outside my actual expertise with a strange amount of confidence because I haven’t been burned by it enough yet.

The known world gets humility.

The unknown world gets confidence.

That feels backwards, but I’m not sure it is. Maybe expertise makes you aware of the gap between passable and excellent. Maybe it makes you more honest about risk. Maybe the better you get at something, the less you believe in easy.

And then there’s the other side of it, which is that other people may have a clearer view of your ability than you do.

Not always. People can overestimate you, underestimate you, project things onto you, or see whatever version of you serves the role you play in their life. The person you are to your boss, your spouse, your kids, your friends, your clients, and yourself are all slightly different versions of the same person.

Which is a trippy concept if you sit with it too long.

There’s a word for the moment when you realize every other person has a life as vivid and complicated as your own: sonder. It’s that realization that you are just an extra in the background of someone else’s story.

And that idea connects back to creative work more than I expected it to.

Because the way I perceive my own photography and video work is not always the way other people perceive it. I see the missed shot, the imperfect light, the edit that could have landed harder, the audio that was not quite where I wanted it, the compromise I had to make because the room was ugly and the clock was running.

Other people may just see the finished thing and think, “That looks good.”

Sometimes they may be right.

Sometimes they may see the capability more clearly than I do, because they are not staring at every little flaw with the accumulated anxiety of the person who made it.

That is the strange part of imposter syndrome. Sometimes you are not seeing yourself clearly. You are seeing every mistake in high resolution and treating everyone else’s finished work as if it came out clean on the first try.

It probably didn’t.

So I don’t know that there is one grand lesson here.

Mostly I think I’m trying to remind myself that confidence and competence do not always arrive together. Sometimes confidence shows up early, before the work has humbled you. Sometimes competence shows up quietly, after years of repetition, and you don’t recognize it because it no longer feels dramatic.

Maybe the thing that feels easy to you is not easy.

Maybe you’ve just done it long enough that you forgot how hard it used to be.