Education, experience and common sense

We all look to so-called “experts” in trying to understand our surroundings, shape our future, make tough decisions and feel secure that we're doing the best for ourselves and the people we love. Now what happens when these models fail to deliver or even mislead us? The poster-child for that is our former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan who gave a renewed meaning to the expression “the emperor has no clothes...” We're pretty angry and even more cynical about the world around us when we run into these false prophets.

The challenge is that it takes a good number of ingredients along with the right distributions of key attribute to produce a reliable expert. The first one that comes to mind is education; sure Harvard sounds more impressive than an unknown state university, but is no guarantee that a graduate at one school will be significantly better than the other. Same thing with the degree and we can go on and on... Experience falls in a similar category. It's not so much the number of years than the quality of the experience that will make a difference. Diversity of situations, crisis resolution and ability to make many decisions often, also weighs in the balance.

Finally, stands my favorite, good old common sense that is not learned so much in school than at home and often is a genetic trait. Without it, school, degrees and experience don't mean much. Oh yes, there's another ingredient that I forgot and that may be the frosting on the cake; it's called luck and is a handy filler that will never fail to embellish the final product!