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Essays

The Bar

Sean Moore

You must be this tall to be taken seriously.

I’ve never liked the notion that my life is little more than climbing the rungs of a ladder. The notion that life is judged by how high you or I are at every given rung, or more importantly, which one of us is higher. Salary, possessions, status, number of direct reports. None of that comes with you in the end, and none of it leaves any sort of meaningful mark on the world. What’s more, this hierarchical, pack-animal mentality feels so antiquated, on the evolutionary time scale. We developed higher brain structures for a reason, so it seems silly to revert back to what amounts to little more than teeth-bearing and tails between the legs.

Still, there is some truth to this idea of different levels, in pure intellectual and skill-set sense of the matter. At any given time you and everyone else lie on some continuum between ignorance and mastery. For the vast majority of things in this world, the gauge hovers around that ignorance level, and that’s perfectly fine; given finite time and attention, you can only do so much with your life. What’s important is that those gauges that you do focus on are always moving in one direction.


Broadly speaking, there’s three regions in that continuum – the beginner, the intermediate, and the master – and they each come with their own sentiments. The beginner knows he is a beginner, because until five minutes ago, he had no idea there was even a Wikipedia on the new-found interest he has taken up. Similarly, he has a pretty clear sense when he is no longer a clueless novice on the subject: typically it lies somewhere between five minutes of reading and taking a college course that you only half slept-through.

Similarly, the master has a strong grasp on where she lies; she’ll write books, she’ll give lectures, and she’ll be the one person in ten thousand that goes to a help forum to give answers, rather than seek them.

That leaves a lot of ground to cover in the middle, between them though, and the poor intermediate to wonder where the hell he is on the scale. Sure, he’s no beginner; in fact, he knows more about whatever his passion may be better than ninety-nine percent of the population.

But that remaining one percent may know his passion ninety-nine times better than he. He puts his all into improving upon his skills: building habits, devoting his spare time, reading, writing, studying, and still the gulf feels as though it does nothing but widen. The masters make the rules, and it’s all he can do to follow them.


I’m reminded of a rather apt saying: the only skiers that need poles are the beginners and the true experts. The beginners need poles, of course, because foregoing them means certain doom. The experts need poles because they’ve learned to use them as precise tools.

When does what you have at your disposal stop becoming a crutch and start becoming that tool? More importantly, how do you know when one has suddenly become the other? Maybe the only way is to keep your head down, eyes on your work, and your arms outstretched before you, searching for that next rung.