The Expert Beginner Trap

Warning Signs

“Next year I’ll go back to school. This time for biology. I just find more meaning in hard sciences and I don’t want to work in web development anymore. I just need to get a few things in place and get a little money before I start.”

This person is living completely in the future. The present moment has become a period of waiting. Waiting for when their life will actually begin and they can start doing what they love. The gap between web development and biology as topics isn’t to be ignored either. Finally, the lack of finances is the last warning sign.

I’m the one who said that opening statement. Only a few months ago. What’s worse is that it’s not the first time I’ve said such things. It’s a pattern I’ve struggled with, studied, thought I beat, and found myself right smack in the middle of it, AGAIN. Baffling. I call this the expert beginner trap and you’ll see why later.

In her book Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke talks about how some people have unusually strong dopamine systems. These are people more prone to addictive behaviours as their dopamine system reacts stronger to dopamine releasing stimulus. Combine this with the fact that learning increases dopamine firing in the brain, and suddenly you might recognize yourself when I say that some people LOVE learning new information.

Do you have a new hobby every season? Find great pleasure in remembering factoids? Have an incredible talent in learning new skills faster than others?

If you answered yes to everything above, you might also answer yes to the darker side of this trait.

Do you have a laundry list of different career paths you’ve taken? Do you have multiple side hustles? Do you have a pile of incomplete projects that started as incredible visions? Are you consistently anxious about making the “right decisions” to get to the “right career”?

Anatomy of the Expert Beginner Trap

Phase 1: “Finding your passion”

As highly dopaminergic people, you can drop us in a juggling class or a chemistry class, and we’ll have a blast (with the right teacher, obviously). Not only will we enjoy learning this new skill or topic, we’ll also be collecting praise from our teacher as they remark on how fast we’re picking up on things. The older you get, the faster you get too, because you have a million adjacent skills under your belt that make it even easier for you to learn new things. It feels really good being such an expert at beginner material.

A couple months into your new classes you’ll be thinking:

“Hallelujah! I found my passion! I’m so good at this, and even though it’s hard sometimes, it’s so much fun. I can totally make a career out of this!”

Cue the near manic excitement about future plans. The planning itself can also be incredibly pleasurable. What will I need in terms of equipment? Who do I need to talk to to make this happen? How can I stand out in this industry?

Don’t forget to relish in the fact that your previously learned skills will suddenly have a new purpose in your newfound career. Those carpentry classes from 4 years ago will come in handy when you build sets for your new photography passion. It’s like it was always meant to be.

Phase 2: Getting Started

The first discomfort comes in quietly. Money. Starting a new career means starting at the bottom and charging bottom prices. A new career means buying tools, paying for classes, and potentially even moving to new places. But you’re so excited by finding your passion that it becomes easy to sweep this discomfort under the rug… for now.

The second discomfort comes when the intro classes are done and you start learning intermediate techniques. The quick feedback loop of learning something new, applying it, and getting praise for it almost immediately, is done. Don’t despair! There’s still plenty to learn and even if it’s getting a bit harder to learn new techniques, it’s still doable in a couple of weeks as opposed to a couple of days like the intro stuff. You can also still show your family and friends all your improvements and get a bit of that praise. At the very least, you can pat yourself on the back as you see the quality of your projects improve from month to month.

Phase 3: The Decision

The problem with the second discomfort is that it only gets worse with time. Once you run out of learning the intermediate stuff, now you need to start learning advanced concepts if you want to get any better. The quick dopamine hits of learning new things is gone, your friends won’t be as excited to give you feedback, and every time you look at free or cheap courses they seem to cover a lot of the same shit you already know. Improving your abilities to an uncommon level is gonna take graduate studies or some serious self-motivation.

It’s at this stage of your blossoming career that you are faced with an unconscious decision to make. These are your options:

1. Settle down with your current skill level in your current job and accept your current situation. Hello boredom.
2. Return to the comforts of learning introductory material in a new domain. Very exciting.
3. Struggle through the difficulties of going from being intermediate to being advanced. Ouf, hard.

The thing about unconscious decisions is we always choose the path of short term gain. So unless you make it conscious, you will generally choose option 2 which puts you right back at Phase 1 of finding a new passion. All decisions are made emotionally first, that part of our brain has been around longer and has tighter and more efficient circuits. Our prefrontal neocortex sluggishly comes in after and rationalizes the emotional decision with some “logic” saying things like:

“I don’t want to sit at a computer all day, I need a job where I can work with my hands.”

“I don’t want to be so hard on my body, I need a job where I can just sit at a desk.”

“I don’t want to make video games, I’d much rather work in AI and do important things.”

“I don’t want to work in AI and be driven to burnout by the demands of the job.”

These are all things that I’ve literally said to myself. In the moment as I thought these things, I felt absolutely justified, but over time, the contradictions in my “logic” became a little painful to look at. Take a moment to write down your own reasons for every career switch and you might see similar contradictions.

The longer you stay in the Expert Beginner Trap, the more the discomfort of not having money builds up. Until finally you reach the Decision Phase of the cycle again and decide on option 1: Settle down where you are because you just can’t afford to keep starting over. Choosing option 1 can introduce a mild nagging regret of not having followed your dreams towards whatever was your last discovered passion. That regret might one day pull you right back into the trap again.

The results of this trap are painfully and artistically captured in the movie Worst Person in the World (2021) which first opened my eyes to my own pattern. I highly recommend watching it if you see yourself at all in this article.

Choosing Your Next Move Consciously

I outlined the Decision Phase as having 3 distinct choices, but obviously life is more complex than that and your particular situation might involve other choices, who knows. Regardless, there is a decision to be made and the more conscious you are of it, the more power you get over your life. Knowing a few key things will give you more control over your decision:

• Your actual passion has been the act of learning. If you’re caught in this trap, it’s likely that your passion hasn’t been whatever topic you were learning, it was learning itself. Recognizing this gives you a dose of reality about how “passionate” you are about a topic you barely know. 
• The pervasive idea that you need to “find your passion” to find work you love is just not true. Cal Newport’s book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” highlights the research that dispels this myth and makes an incredible case for building passion. Building a passion that lasts decades isn’t straightforward, which is why it’s so rare to come across. But perpetually being a beginner is about as close to the opposite of this level of passion that I can think of.
• Being in a flow state makes learning advanced skills more manageable and achievable. There are many techniques to make flow state occur more frequently. This can make choosing to stay in your field during the Decision Phase more interesting and less painful when it comes time to struggle through learning advanced concepts.
• Mastering a few advanced skills feels REALLY GOOD. I promise it’s better than being a beginner and learning 30 things in a day. Getting to that level is hard but ABSOLUTELY worth it. I’ve only got a few tricks I’d consider advanced at this point of my career, but having felt even a sliver of what’s possible, I’m excited to stay focused on the concepts I’m learning.
• Having a sense of purpose and a mission helps tremendously. Choosing to stay in the same career doesn’t mean staying in the same job. Feeling absolutely solid about your mission in life can help you decide when changing jobs makes sense. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. Simply choosing a mission because you like the sound of it, doesn’t work in the long run. But that’s the subject for another day.

I get that these pieces likely open more questions than they answer, but that’s kind of the point. As a highly dopaminergic person, curiosity is one of your super powers, so aim it at what matters. Even if at times it can be a bit painful to look at how you’re hurting yourself. Unfortunately, regardless of your choice during the Decision Phase, you’ll always have some kind of discomfort to face. Discomfort is a natural part of life that is unavoidable. Choosing which discomfort you’ll face is what lets you stop life from just happening to you.

My Personal Tricks

As I stated in the beginning of this article, I still find myself falling into the trap from time to time. Over time I have collected a few protection mechanisms that work for me.

• Feed that learning monster, but put them on a diet. Learn topics that are adjacent to your field and always keep a lens on what you currently do as opposed to what you could do. 
• Recognize when you’re simply snacking on ideas. Let yourself get carried away planning another career, imagining a future where you solve some problem in society. Dopamine feels good and you can absolutely get some pleasure from daydreaming. Just recognize it for what it is, just an idea, and feel satisfied with it only existing in a make believe world. It’s free, feels good, and kids do it all the time. Plus you won’t derail whatever career momentum you have every time you have an idea.
• Enjoy new hobbies instead of new careers. Just because your pottery classes are going REALLY well, doesn’t mean you need to start looking at renting a studio and start selling coffee mugs on weekends. Just enjoy gifting a bowl to your friend and leave it at that. Definitely ignore your friend who says “Omg this is so beautiful, you should sell these!”. They mean well, but aren’t the ones who would need to do all the labour required to follow through on that statement.
• Exercise and get some sleep. Seriously. The amount of times I’ve been convinced I hate my job only to actually take care of my basic needs and realize I have a sweet job I love. It’s silly and borderline embarrassing.

A Few Words on Fear

Choosing to go for mastery in your current domain might feel daunting, risky, or even egotistical. “Who the hell am I to think I can be better than everyone else?”. It isn’t till you’ve started learning a topic that you realize just how deep it goes. It’s normal to feel a little dizzy thinking about everything you still need to learn.

There’s fear in commitment too. What if you could make more money elsewhere? What if you could have more impact? What if you would have more fun doing something else? Yup… what if. Here’s a last “what if” for you to consider though: What if you never give any career enough of a chance to really have an impact, make money, and start having fun in the long run?

Finally, you might be scared of the amount of work it will take to get past the fears, struggle learning advanced skills, and constantly ignore the temptation of the shiny and new. You’re absolutely right, it is more work. Let me be clear since there’s a lot of grind mindset people out there, and while I understand the appeal, it just isn’t my philosophy. I’m advocating for deliberate practice and developing a real passion along with an uncommon level of skill. When you start to have those expert level skills you don’t work more, you work less. Either metaphorically, because you enjoy what you do so much that it feels like play. Or quite literally, as you get your job done faster or with a higher quality that lets you work on fewer projects to support yourself financially.

If you want guidance in facing these fears, moving towards mastery, and breaking out of your own expert beginner trap, you can reach out to me. I absolutely love this shit and it barely feels like work to me.