The purgatory of being in-between naive beginner excitement and rational experienced master is basically where I live for most skills, just right there in the Trough of Disillusionment on the Gartner hype cycle. It feels like there’s a ton of support for “getting started”, and a ton of support for highly niche specialization, but just not a lot that helps you get through the purgatory of “intermediate”. This goes for learning a new language, or how to code, or baking, or entrepreneurship, or writing, or managing, or whatever. There’s so much out there to support the zero-to-one initialization, and then there’s deep subject matter expertise, but the “messy middle” is really hard, seemingly endlessly wandering through a liminal space.
I don’t really feel like I’m hitting “enlightment” in anything, just maybe finding how much farther down the “disillusionment” goes, but I’m also not anywhere near “inflated expectations” for any of my skills so that seems to put me pretty solidly in the “intermediate” range. I love picking up new things – I mentioned before that I challenged myself to learn how to bake macarons, and that I wanted to learn how to code so I joined a machine learning lab – and it’s so frustrating to get the basics down then just have zero resources to get through “intermediate” to “fluent” or “advanced”. There’s the 10,000 hours rule, which says that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, but that seems to emphasize the point that there’s always tons of resources to help you with the first 10-100 hours, but after that it’s just supposed to be grinding until you reach near-mastery and can get into the ultra-deep niche groups, I guess.
So how do you get through “intermediate” to be considered a “master”? Although it’s the 10,000 hour rule, realistically that’s more like 5 years of fairly dedicated training, so about the average American science PhD program. The first year is structured classes like high school or college, with more in depth materials, but after the first year or two it’s all unstructured research, largely self-guided with some input from your PhD advisors and thesis committee members. In the end, when you defend and get the “PhD” letters after your name, society generally recognizes you as a “master” in that subject, which is itself a hilariously sub-sub-sub-field specific niche, a tiny drop in the vast vast ocean of human knowledge.
In the things where I’m “intermediate”, I don’t feel like I make a lot of progress after those first 1-2 years of structured learning. Maybe because the rest all needs to be self-guided? I wish there was more structure out there for intermediate anything, to at least learn more about what I need to learn.
I probably just need to learn to embrace the journey that is being “intermediate” and find ways to enjoy the process more.
Lindsay K. Pino 