I’m Not as Smart as I Think I Am (And Neither Are You!)

I used to think I understood photography after taking one decent sunset photo with my phone. I was ready to quit my day job and become the next Ansel Adams. That confidence lasted exactly until I tried to recreate the shot and realized I had absolutely no idea what I'd done right the first time.

Welcome to the Dunning-Kruger effect in action—that beautiful, humbling moment when we realize that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially to our egos.

The Confidence Roller Coaster

If you've ever learned a new skill, you've probably experienced this journey:

Stage 1: Blissful Ignorance
"How hard can this be? I'll watch a YouTube video."

Stage 2: Peak Overconfidence
"I'm basically a pro now. This tutorial was all I needed."

Stage 3: The Reality Check
"Wait, why isn't this working? This is way harder than it looked."

Stage 4: The Competence Climb
"Okay, I'm starting to understand what I don't know."

Stage 5: Actual Expertise
"I know enough to know how much I still don't know."

Sound familiar? That's because this pattern repeats itself every single time we tackle something new.

Why Our Brains Betray Us

The Dunning-Kruger effect isn't meant to make anyone feel stupid. It's just how our brains are wired. When we're beginners, we literally don't know enough to recognize our own incompetence. It's not that we're delusional; we just lack the framework to accurately assess our abilities.

Think about it: to recognize that you're bad at something, you need to understand what "good" looks like. But if you're just starting out, you don't have that reference point yet.

The Beginner's Paradox

Here's the cruel irony: the skills needed to be good at something are often the exact same skills needed to recognize goodness in that area.

• To know you're a bad writer, you need to understand what good writing looks like

• To realize your business plan has holes, you need to know what a solid plan contains

• To see that your design skills need work, you need an eye for good design

• To see that you’re a crappy manager, you need to have experience being managed well. Ahem, and have the tiniest ounce of self-awareness I said what I said.

So, we spend our early learning days not just bad at the thing, but bad at knowing we're bad at the thing.

The Expertise Paradox

But here's where it gets really interesting: the more you actually learn, the less confident you become. Seriously, and if you’re anything like me the confidence is a constant roller coaster ride.

Real experts are often plagued by imposter syndrome because they understand how vast their field truly is. They know about all the nuances, exceptions, and edge cases that beginners haven't even discovered yet.

I know a programmer with 20 years of experience who still googles basic syntax. Meanwhile, the bootcamp graduate thinks they're ready to build the next Facebook. Who do you think actually knows more?

Recognizing the Signs

You might be in Peak Overconfidence if you:

• Find yourself using phrases like "just" and "simply" a lot

• Think the experts are overcomplicating things

• Feel ready to teach others after minimal experience

• Dismiss warnings or best practices as unnecessary

• Believe you've found a revolutionary new approach that no one has thought of

• Constantly call everyone else stupid (not so subtle attempt at being snarky)

You might be developing real competence if you:

• Start seeing complexity where you once saw simplicity

• Appreciate why certain "rules" exist

• Feel less confident than when you started

• Ask more questions instead of making more statements

• Realize how much preparation goes into making something look "easy"

The Learning Sweet Spot

The goal isn't to eliminate confidence—confidence can drive us to try new things and push through challenges. The goal is calibrated confidence: being appropriately confident based on your actual skill level.

Strategies for Staying Grounded

1. Seek Out Criticism Early and Often
Don't wait until you think you're "ready" for feedback. Get input from people who are genuinely better than you, not just your supportive friends and family.

2. Study the Masters
Really study them. Don't just admire their work—try to understand their process, their failures, their development over time. You'll quickly realize the depth you're missing.

3. Track Your Predictions
Keep a record of your estimates: How long will this take? How difficult will this be? How will people respond? Looking back at your predictions is a humbling experience.

4. Embrace Being a Beginner
There's freedom in admitting you don't know what you're doing. It opens you up to learning opportunities you'd miss if you were pretending to be more advanced.

5. Find Your Dunning-Kruger Triggers
We all have areas where we're especially susceptible to overconfidence. Maybe it's anything involving technology, or areas where you have some natural talent. Know your blind spots.

The Competence Journey Never Ends

Here's what I've learned after years of thinking I was smarter than I actually was: expertise isn't a destination, it's a journey of increasingly sophisticated ignorance.

The programmer realizes they don't understand distributed systems. The writer discovers they know nothing about plot structure. The marketer finds out they've been thinking about customer psychology all wrong.

Each level of competence reveals new levels of complexity you couldn't even see before.

Making Peace with Not Knowing

The most liberating realization? Everyone is figuring it out as they go. Even the experts you admire started where you are now, made the same overconfident mistakes, and went through the same humbling process.

The difference between them and the wannabes isn't that they never experienced Dunning-Kruger—it's that they pushed through the discomfort of realizing they didn't know as much as they thought.

The Real Measure of Intelligence

Intelligence isn't about how much you know or how quickly you pick things up. It's about how accurately you can assess what you know versus what you don't know, and how willing you are to update your beliefs when presented with new evidence.

The smartest people I know are the ones who say "I don't know" the most often, and who get genuinely excited when someone proves them wrong because it means they learned something new.

So, the next time you catch yourself feeling like an expert after learning something new, take a breath. You're not as smart as you think you are right now—but if you keep learning and stay humble, you might become as smart as you think you are someday.

And that's a much more interesting journey than being right all the time.

What's an area where you've experienced the Dunning-Kruger effect? Share your humbling learning moments in the comments.

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About the Author
Gal is an autistic artist, late-diagnosed at 49, and the creator of AuRTistic Expressions—a space where neurodivergent truth meets creative survival. Through blog posts, printables, courses, and the “This Might Get Messy” podcast, Gal explores what it means to unmask safely, communicate authentically, and make art that doesn’t ask for permission. Stick around—there’s plenty more where this came from.

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