Nobody Knows as Much as You Think They Do
We're all trying to figure it out
I had this colleague, I’ll call him Marco, who made Grasshopper look easy.
You could throw almost any problem at him and he’d find an answer. It was honestly a little annoying.
So when we ended up working on the same Grasshopper script together, I figured I could just sit back and watch. I had my own ideas on how to solve it, but I was sure Marco would just bulldoze his way through like he always did.
I remember walking into our meeting ready to defend myself. Ready to make the argument about why my approach was better. But there was no argument, in fact, Marco actually asked for my approach. Instead of a fight, we had a good discussion about the scripting approach. Marco wanted my help and opinion more than I thought. Could it be, that Perfect Marco needed help?
The script was a tricky problem to solve. We’d brainstorm something, test it, hit a wall, re-convene to try something else over and over again. Eventually, we got it working and it became the cornerstone of that project. The project could not have been delivered if it wasn’t for us.
I should be proud but all I could think about was how horrible I was to Marco.
Hi, I’m Braden
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In the beginning, instead of trying to solve the problem, I kicked back and let Marco handle everything. Even after he sought my help, I just watched intently, waiting for the moment he’d trip up. I wanted to see the cracks. To be the one who got to say “ha I knew you weren’t perfect.”
But when we worked together, Marco continuously valued my work. It felt more like a partnership figuring things out instead of him bulldozing me with his ideals. What made me open up more was when I realized Marco didn’t actually know everything. He wasn’t in his Ivory tower looking down at me, he was figuring things out the same way I was, just with less insecurity about asking for help.
After the project finished, I took some time to reflect on why Marco had bothered me so much in the beginning. And it sounds cliché, but I had confused fluency with certainty. Watching someone move quickly and decisively through problems had made me feel small. Like I had missed something. Like maybe if I just studied more, spent more time on problems, I too would be Marco.
But working with him reminded me that there’s no promised land. Not for Marco. Not for me. Not for anyone. The people who look like they have everything figured out have their own battles too. And just because they seem so certain, it’s not a reflection of my own incompetence.
I knew I didn’t have to know everything but part of me always thinks that I should know more than I actually do. Like I should know more about structural analysis since I have been working in a structural firm for 6 years. Or I should know more about software since I have been a computational designer for 8 years now. There’s always a “I should know this...”.
I am still trying but I now know that other people’s certainty is not a reflection of my incompetence. In fact, if I don’t know something I should just ask. Just because I am in the same field as someone and that someone knows more, it doesn’t mean I am less skilled.
So if you’ve been hesitating to ask for help because you feel like you should already know, the people you’d ask probably feel that way sometimes too. I definitely feel that way all the time.
We’re all just doing our best to figure it out.
Thanks for reading
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