One of my generation’s most potent icons, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, said it best: "All my life I've known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?" Through brilliant use of “the Self-Attacking Weasel Defense” JFK showed his own expertise.
Expertise comes in all the colors of the rainbow, a few thousand flavors, and wrapped in many forms of cute, attractive, and (these days we’d prefer) environmentally friendly packaging. In the final analysis, however, it boils down to one thing: experts exist because people trust them to know better.
Most everyone claims to have some sort of an expert they’ve relied on. It’s kind of the reverse of the philisophical question, “But what about the last guy?” when you look around to see no matter how miserable your life is, there’s always someone who’s worse off. In this case, there’s always the expert above you until you reach the Expert of Experts.
JFK is a perfect example of the shrewd use of expertise. As President of the United States (and especially at that particular time) we here in the US pretty much considered him just one step below the Expert of Experts. Let me qualify that; JFK may have considered himself two steps below the Expert of Experts. I forgot about the Pope.
In his quote JFK was referring to the Bay of Pigs invasion where our government orchestrated a clandestine “invasion” of Cuba. We launched a tiny, rag-tag force of poorly armed operatives on little more than dinghies to the shores of Cuba to take the island from Fidel. When they were quickly overrun, we denied them support, causing what is known as an “international incident”.
Some people call that failure. Not JFK. Like the best of experts he used his poor choices to solidify his reputation as a world-class expert. He used what’s known in my e-book (The Expert’s Guide to Exceptional Expertise) as the Self-Attacking Weasel Defense.
Everyone knows that one of the signs of true expertise is to know how to use experts. What we usually don’t give experts credit for is just how slick they are about doing it. True experts know they don’t have all the answers, but what they’re best at is assimilating information from others and coming to a satisfactory decision based on that input. The first thing they do, upon discovering that a crucial decision they made blew up in their faces, is to identify the weak spot in their decision-making, which, of course, was relying on people who convinced them they knew better.
Humility, as evidenced by JFK’s exclamation “How could I have been so stupid?” did more to solidify his reputation as an expert than erode it. After all, it is reassuring to hear from an expert that he is as human and fallible as we are. And since we all make most of our poor decisions based on advice from idiots whom we thought were experts, we can see him as even trustworthier.
JFK makes sure we understand that he is at the top of the expert heap in the United States, because he has always “known better than to depend on the experts.” How much more expert can you be than to not have to rely on anyone else for your expertise?
This brings us back to the Expert of Experts concept, which boils down to everyone wanting to believe the buck stops somewhere. Run-of-the-mill experts want you to believe the buck stops with them. True experts, like JFK, imply that if the buck hits him in the face, it’s due to a subversive act of the Expert of Experts, and not from his own doing. Who else could have sent him such idiots as guides? His only mistake was to believe.
JFK identified himself as a man who knew it all himself, until this very human lapse in judgment prompted him to let “them go ahead.” Paradoxically, this strengthened his reputation as an expert because his downfall, that of trusting others, was a reflection of him being expert enough, for once, to trust others.
Once you begin to work with the laws of perception, credibility, and those other eight concepts of establishing yourself as an expert that I’ve written about (Experts Use Ten Simple Concepts), you may come closer to becoming an expert yourself. The worst that will happen is you’ll get bogged down, confused and feeling hopeless and out of control. In that case, you’ll turn to me, the expert for guidance, and pay me well for it, too.
There’s a lot to learn from JFK and Drew Kittinger. Perhaps the most important thing is to make sure your name gets in the search engines right alongside of an icon of your times. That’s a free tip. Put it to good use.