The Lazy Expert Syndrome

American businessman and gangster Al Capone built himself an empire with revenues amounting to $100 million every year. The problem was that he was working in drug trafficking, gambling, and murder, and he got away with his crimes for years because he built a network of affiliated people to carry out what he wanted.

Note: This article is based on the work of Tyler Tervooren, who tells us about the Lazy Expert Syndrome.

He was a careful man, and all the crime bureaus in the United States were trying to take him down, but it was impossible to catch him, and he made the extraordinarily stupid mistake of telling the Attorney General that he was sick and could not come to court to testify in a case.

The police then investigated, found him in good health and arrested him for contempt of court, starting a series of charges that eventually led to his entire career being dropped and Capone being sent to the infamous Alcatraz prison, the downfall of one of the richest men in America due to a small mistake. How could that happen? He got lazy.

Capone was ruined by vanity. He thought he was so untouchable that he didn't need to be careful anymore.

The world is better off without Capone's expertise, but it is not better off without yours. If you've made a rookie mistake, you should have been more careful, as you might have experienced what happened to Capone: Lazy Expert Syndrome. So tune in to learn how to prevent Lazy Expert Syndrome from destroying you.

Why do you suffer from Lazy Expert Syndrome?

To understand how even the smartest people in the world can ruin their lives and careers with a simple mistake, you have to understand how the human mind works. God has blessed you with the ability to think, reason, and calculate. Put these skills together, and you'll have an amazing ability to assess the dangers that surround you every day.

When you first get acquainted with these dangers, you are afraid of them. This is how the brain works. It fears what it does not understand. For example, when you cook your first meal with your parents, they tell you that the stove is hot and you have to be careful. As a result, you are very careful, but with time, you become an expert cook, and you can use it with more confidence.

As you build that confidence, your fear subsides, and that's good. You make better food faster. If you're not careful, however, you might become overconfident and start to think you're such an expert in the kitchen that all the rules you learned before are for beginners only, that you’re an expert and you cannot get burned, and then you end up in the hospital.

How to avoid beginner mistakes?

Previously, I was a construction manager for a multinational company. We were obsessed with safety. Insurance for construction companies was very expensive. One way to stay competitive was to make sure employees didn't get hurt. We only had one problem: Many of our employees have been physically hurt.

So, we did the logical thing: we improved our training programs, and when we hired new employees, they had to undergo rigorous safety training.

We trained them and talked about safety mechanisms. The injuries continued, and when the specialists analyzed the data to find out why the new safety program did not work, the problem was quite clear. The new workers were safer than ever, but it was the old workers who were getting hurt.

The older workers knew all the rules and practices, had been instilled with a culture of safety for years and were experts in their craft, but because they had spent so much time working without a single scratch, they became overconfident and decided that some of these rules they could overlook. They suffered from Lazy Expert Syndrome, which is what caused them to get hurt.

Knowing this, we have changed our approach. Instead of letting the older workers become overconfident, we put them in charge of training the younger workers, and that's when things changed. Employees who had not thought about safety in years were forced not only to remember it but to teach it. This is because they have become the safety watchdogs of the younger generation, so no watcher wants to be caught breaking the law. Suddenly, our older workers were the new paradigm of safety, living happily ever after, being healthy, and having lower insurance premiums.

Incorporate these concepts into your work through mentoring

If you have become comfortable in your work after a long time in the field, then it is time to follow the same approach that we did, and what you need to do is find a way to remember all the important things that you learned a long time ago, which principles have made you an expert, and you need to do this regularly.

The best way to do this is to become enlightened. That is, look for someone new in your field or someone who is ambitious but has no experience. This is the perfect opportunity not only to develop yourself as a leader but to keep going as well. This is because beginners have a way of asking questions and looking for information that forces them to remember all the basic principles.

Sometimes, they help you realize that you've been doing something wrong all along, or at least you can do it better, and the end result is that you get a new follower of your way of thinking, and you improve your own processes at the same time by reminding yourself of what got you to where you are now and implementing new ideas that you wouldn't have otherwise.

In conclusion

You do not need to be a star in your field to be a mentor. If you have been doing your job for a while, you will always have someone new who can benefit from your wisdom. If you work for a larger company, ask HR if you have an official mentoring program. Sometimes there is one.

If there isn't, that shouldn't stop you from taking on the role of mentor, and you'll probably have an opportunity to share what you know with someone else. So start getting into the habit of helping new co-workers learn, and if you want to stay ahead of the curve, mentoring is an effective way to do that.