> Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.
This is very true.
Last year I saw a motorcycle stunt display in the Isle of Man. It was all very impressive, and the chap had extremely good control of the bike, but the time that his skill was most apparent was when he had the rear wheel of the bike on a car bonnet and it started sliding off to one side. I thought he was for sure going to crash because there's no possible way to save it when his feet are so far from the ground. Somehow he managed to wriggle around and force the wheel back to the centre. I still don't know how. But that was the bit that showed me how skilled he was: not the amazing bike control that he wanted to display, but the way he recovered from a seemingly-unrecoverable mistake.
This is true in many fields, including IT. Anybody can install a piece of software by repeatedly clicking OK, and most of the time it'll go fine, but you'll need the expert when the install/upgrade goes horribly wrong with a slew of incomprehensible error messages.
Agreed. Reminds me of a friend in finance who oversees reconciling the transactions at the end of the day. He says that most days he does almost nothing, but every once in a while, at the end of the day, the department can't track down where some $300 milion transaction ended up. That's when his expertise comes into play.
> The hood (North American English) or bonnet (Commonwealth English excluding Canada) is the hinged cover over the engine of motor vehicles that allows access to the engine compartment
In case anyone else wasn't familiar with the term.
I've seen a couple friends go through a sort of change, it's kind of when they arrive or something.
One friend worked on cars for a couple years as a hobby. I saw him a few years later, and he said to me, "I can do anything here."
It was sort of a statement of mastery, of self-confidence and of happiness. He had maintained things, then diagnosed things, then fixed things, then fabricated things.
It's also not bluster or boneheadedness or hold-my-beer.
Another look at that stuntman might've been if he did botch it and fall, how he'd play that to the crowd. A professional performer would handle that better than someone falling and entering a panic.
This is very true.
Last year I saw a motorcycle stunt display in the Isle of Man. It was all very impressive, and the chap had extremely good control of the bike, but the time that his skill was most apparent was when he had the rear wheel of the bike on a car bonnet and it started sliding off to one side. I thought he was for sure going to crash because there's no possible way to save it when his feet are so far from the ground. Somehow he managed to wriggle around and force the wheel back to the centre. I still don't know how. But that was the bit that showed me how skilled he was: not the amazing bike control that he wanted to display, but the way he recovered from a seemingly-unrecoverable mistake.