How to Demonstrate Competence Even if You Are Inexperienced

There is an apocryphal story that has circulated for many years that talks about the knowledge that experts have.  One version of the story is one where a man is called to fix an issue with a large cargo ship.  There is some difficulty with the engines that no one has been able to remedy.  The man listens to the engine for a few minutes, takes out his hammer, hits the engine with the hammer and the issue is all fixed.  He then bills the shipping company for $20,000. 

The owner of the ship is furious and yells: “You only worked on the ship for 5 minutes! I want a detailed bill.”  The bill is sent, and it has 2 lines:  Hammer hit-$20; 30 Years of Knowledge to know where to hit-$19,980.

Naturally, this story raises many questions and has been repeated and retold in many versions, but the essence of the story is the value of experience and using it to increase your knowledge to provide value for others.  Even though $20,000 seems extreme, how many hours of lost revenue did the giant ship endure until it was fixed?  The $20,000 was a small price to pay to have it fixed and working again.

The one issue with the story that concerns many people, particularly young, inexperienced people, is the idea of all of those years of experience were required for the man to have the specialized knowledge to fix the engine so quickly and correctly.  Truth be told that idea probably concerns most people who want to either learn something new or help others solve their issues with their knowledge.  The idea that one has to put in years of work to gain specialized knowledge can be disheartening if we want to help people today.

But is it really true?  Do you have to have years of experience to help people, or can you help people and make a living even if you are young or new to a field?  The answer is NO-it is not true that you have to have experience to help people and to make money, even large amounts of money doing it.

We associate long years of experience with competence because historically people who were older had simply learned how to deal with many more things than those who were younger.  This was in a time before formal education, where you had to learn by doing and that could take many years.  That is why we think of older people doing more manual things like mechanical repairs and hobbies that seem to require years to perfect like painting, gardening, wine making and car restoration.

However, when we go to live museums and see demonstrations of old-world crafts like leather-working and blacksmithing it is more and more common to have younger people doing the demonstration.  We now live in a time when the information of the entire world is at our fingertips.  We can go to YouTube and learn almost anything by watching someone else do it.

The reality is that if you can demonstrate competence by showing you can fix someone else’s challenge, you have shown them value.  When you fix the issue for them, your seeming lack of experience is irrelevant.  At that point you could have been in business for one day and the client would be happy if you did what they needed.

If you know how to do something or fix something, THAT is valuable to people and to the market in general.  Young people are known for having more knowledge in newer technology and helping older people with it but think about when you meet a much older person who is expert at Social Media or Blogging or Robotics!  You are certainly very impressed, because it is new technology, but they probably learned as most other people do by becoming users of the technology and learning from it.

The opposite is also true.  While we are often amazed to see our grandparents using Social Media expertly, we are just as amazed to see very young people doing older crafts like sculpture and metal working. 

If you can demonstrate that you can help people by showing competence in an area they are not familiar with, your age and experience will mean very little to them; the value that you provide will be all that matters.