The World Cup and my Dissertation

12/11/2005

Inspiration from Bruce Arena (US Men’s Coach) on drawing Italy, Czechs, and Ghana for World Cup in 2006. “it is what it is.” Indeedy.

For better or for worse, the black thoughts that plague me should just be left behind.

There is a certain troubled relationship with expertise I have. I seem to berate myself for not being more of an “expert.” Meanwhile, I jump from interest to interest so that my expertise doesn’t seem to accumulate that much in any one thing. But maybe my sense of expertise is off-target. Like, I think if I have to think about something, or do some reading, then I am not an expert. If the answer Is not on the tip of my tongue, then I am not an expert.

But maybe this is where I need a massive dose of “get over myself.” The very act of revisiting my own experience and knowledge, my own writings and musings, is what builds my expertise. It is not the internalization of all possible knowledge that makes me an expert. It is the ability to perform in a given context that makes me an expert, which is, of course, always a relative reference anyway. I am an expert compared to someone else.

So, having 60+pages of pre writing and free writing is a resource for being an expert, not evidence for the eternal prosecutor to use to make the case that I am a fraud. Having my e-journal spread over12 files with file names that are hash of indexing is not one more datum in the great “jordi-is-not-an-expert” database. They are what they are- the sinews and stitches of my thinking and doing.

Too much of the former, not enough of the later.

Hence, next post on the exploration and exploitation.