"Unmasking Ignorance"

J. Balla Photography

I’m happiest when I learn something new (I might be a nerd). But there is nothing like that aha moment when something just “clicks”.

But the thing with knowledge and learning is that sometimes we don’t even know what we don’t know and have to learn. One of my uncles will say someone is unmasking ignorance when they are boldly making proclamations that are wrong. How do we know that we are not going about life unmasking ignorance?

There is a framework that you could use to know where you are on your learning path. This was developed by Abraham Maslow. You might remember him from the more popular Maslow’s law of hierarchy of needs. 

The hierarchy or stages of Competence

This will be the typical stage you will go through in learning a skill. I will use bicycles as an example.

The stages are as follows:

1. Unconscious Incompetence, at this stage you have no idea of what you don’t know. What we might call blissful ignorance. You don’t know how to do something and you don’t even know that you don’t know. Eg you didn’t know that there is a contraption called a bicycle. Because you don’t know bicycles exist, you don’t know that you don’t know how to ride one because how do you learn how to ride what you didn't even know existed? Then, one day you appear in a city say Amsterdam where there are more bicycles than cars and you are completely baffled by these “witches and wizards” on a 2-wheeler metal thing cruising around.

2. Conscious Incompetence: You have become aware of your incompetence or knowledge gap. You either start making plans to fix it if you can be bothered or you don’t but you now know that you don’t know. Eg you now know that wonder like the bicycle exists. You also know that you don’t know how to ride one, you either decide you want to join the “witches”  and learn or you decide please this thing looks too risky. I will rather stay away. 

3. Conscious Competence: At this stage, you have dipped your legs into the “waters” of learning this skill. You are up for the challenge but like any learning process, there are moments of frustration, some tears and blood. You are painfully aware of how much you are struggling.  It’s at this point that most people drop in the learning process. Eg You decide to learn to ride a bike, you buy a shiny red bicycle (don’t ask me why I choose red lol) you get a friend to teach you and after a few falls and bruises, you begin to wonder if this is even worth it. If your life was not ok when you didn’t know about bicycles. 

4. Unconscious Competence: This is the pinnacle of all learning experiences.  You become soooooo good that you are not even aware of how good you are. It’s ingrained in your consciousness.  It's at this point in your bicycle learning process that you could shout “ma look no hands” at the top of your voice. 

You are unconsciously competent in some areas if people always come to you because they believe you are so good at it. These things come so effortlessly to you. You don’t have to exert much effort when doing them. Back to the bicycle example, they say that once you have learnt how to drive you can never unlearn it. Even if you don’t ride in 10 years, once you have learnt it you back pick up the bike and off you go without even doubting your ability for a second. the memory just kicks in. 

Sprezzatura which means nonchalance: graceful conduct or performance without apparent effort. can be used to describe the unconscious competence stage. That is definitely aspirational. 

In anything we are doing, the magic begins to happen at stage 3. Stage 4 is for the rockstars that persevere.

Can you think of something where you fall into any of these stages at the moment?

Keep going,

Ije