For nearly 15 years, I’ve been talking to men about their lives. I started to notice a pattern common to many, myself included: an eventual disillusionment with institutions, beliefs, subjects, or life itself after a season of zeal or passion.
Religious zeal enters a deconstruction period, or even unbelief; love for a former community turns into distrust; or, more plainly, someone who finds fascination in a subject now shrugs it off as a “waste of time.”
This immediately brought into mind what I could only remember as the “Diane Kruger” effect.
…Google knew what I meant, anyway.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Overestimating Ourselves
For those unfamiliar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, here it is in a nutshell.
As you begin learning something, you can gain a high degree of over-confidence in your knowledge or competency around the subject.
As you continue in the process, however, you realize your lacking cognitive abilities, and your confidence dips considerably. Check it out:
This can lead to someone feeling defeated – like they’re less valuable, or that they’ve failed in some way. It could even affect performance in a given area.
For men, this can be particularly hard, as we’re wired to be impacted by changes in perceived status more than women.
Thus a hypothetical explanation for these experiences known by myself and my friend (and others that we know). Side note: I wonder if it can help explain the midlife crisis that men often go through.
How Little You Know and How Far You Have to Go
As we chatted, my friend and I started to realize that some of our own feelings of defeatedness in Christian life and ministry may have been because of this very effect. We had been through the wringer. Things were not as we thought they’d be. We were losing a sense of our idealism, and even a sense of our self-identity.
It made sense; we used to think we knew a whole lot about the Christian experience and how to live it. When things didn’t go our way, as we learned about how life just is, we began to sense this kind of defeat – this dip in confidence.
But here’s something you might not have thought about: this Dunning-Kruger effect is absolutely inevitable.
If you want to learn or grow in expertise, count on this: at one point or another, you will realize how little you know and how far you have to go.
Isn’t that freeing?
No matter where I apply myself, defeat will find me. I will realize that I must remain a constant learner. I’m not weird. I’m not defeated, a loser, or a failure. I’m completely normal. And it gets better:
Experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect is a sign that I am learning and growing. Remember, this dip in confidence comes because you are moving towards knowledge or skill, not away from it.
Inevitable… and Necessary
I like to think the Dunning-Kruger effect is not only inevitable but useful.
It’s useful because anyone who is going to be confident and competent in an area and contribute meaningfully to society must be humble. And boy is defeat humbling.
But humility is a good thing. When we realize that we need to be constant learners, we starve our ego and mature. Hopefully, we can be less about ourselves and more about our fellow man.
It’s quite possible – even common – that some will simply push through these humbling seasons and double down on their narcissism. They may even blame others for their newly realized insufficiencies.
This is where the real battle is lost and won, however. The question is not whether you will experience the humbling, but what you will do with it when it comes.
If you want to make the most of the Dunning-Kruger experience, I say let it humble you, build your character, and make you more about others and less about yourself. Feel it, remind yourself that it’s inevitable and helpful, and keep moving forward.
Finally, remember that the humbling comes and goes with seasons. In the end, a sense of security and confidence is restored with character to boot. For my Christian friend and I, the hard but beautiful reality of our spiritual growth was that God grows us by bringing us low – by humbling us. Life is trial by fire. But the fire burns away the impurities and we come out the other side stronger and better than ever before.
Just look at the curve again – the best is yet to come!
