A poor workman blames shoddy work on his tools. People use this phrase to say that the quality of work is lacking, not due to resources or tools, but due to the workman himself. He is merely lacking the expertise to do the job right. It is a situation you don’t want to find yourself in, where the job is beyond the capabilities of the individual who is tasked to do it.
Of course, you want your reputation to be one of expertise, quality work and honesty. There is genuinely no substitute for experience and knowing your craft thoroughly. The only way to build up knowledge is by repetition. This means building on the things you know, doing them often. Over time the repetition will ensure that the sub-tasks can be performed based on muscle memory, boosting the quality of work and speed at which things are done. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try new things and take on jobs slightly outside your comfort zone. Being slightly outside your comfort zone, within reason, is the only way to grow your expertise.
The real question is how you balance the two things. How much should you stay in your comfort zone and how much should you step outside? This is extremely hard to determine an approach generally. The right balance will be different from person to person. This is all about the level of ambiguity that a single person can deal with at a given time. It’s important to start defining this for yourself. Ask yourself: ‘Do I have it too easy?‘. If the answer is ‘yes’, you might be sitting too firmly in your comfort zone. However, if the answer to the same question makes you break out in tears of sheer desperation and anxiety, you might have gone too far and are in the panic zone. The answer should be one of having the reassurance to be able to get most of the job done, with a small and healthy dose of ‘will have to find out’, but with confidence.
This is how you filter the best experts from the good and bad. It’s this ability to balance out sticking to his or her guns and trying new things. That is not to say that you should always have a mix of old and new. Commercial savvy experts (and therefore with lasting power in their field) will recognise the need to keep the cash-flow healthy and where the opportunity arises to do something new. The reality is that the world keeps changing and any self-respecting expert is aware of that.
This brings us back to the saying about the workman and his tools. It probably needs updating as we see that nowadays sometimes the tool can be an inhibitor for high-quality work. It’s becoming more common for a new technology or tool to have a fundamental impact on a field of expertise or even transform an industry. Take engineering for example, which has fundamentally changed by 3d printing becoming widely available. Or take lab research for instance, in which tools dominate the industry, where a better microplate will boost effectiveness and capability. The perfect workman not only has considerable expertise. But also, the ability to recognise game-changing tools and tech and will adapt in time.
