I have always thought that being an expert meant knowing more than others. Reading more. Trying more things. Accumulating more information. I saw knowledge as a ladder you climb step by step until you reach a certain authority.
In today’s context, that idea no longer feels right. It doesn’t really work anymore.
Information is no longer a privilege. It is accessible, abundant, immediate. Anyone can reach the same data in seconds. And yet, confusion seems to be everywhere. Information and knowledge are still important, of course, but they are no longer enough. Being an expert has become a matter of judgment.
According to Tom Nichols, when access to knowledge is democratized, what differentiates people is not what they know, but how they judge what they know. And that distinction, in my opinion, changes everything.
In Mind Over Machine, Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus describe the expert not as someone who applies rules, but as someone who knows how to move when rules are no longer enough. Expertise appears in ambiguity, in exceptions. That is where knowledge becomes human.
The new conditions of expertise
The environment we live in no longer rewards certainty, confidence or stability. Conditions change fast, and solutions that worked yesterday often create friction today. Holding too tightly to what you know can be just as problematic as not knowing enough.
One of the clearest signs of modern expertise might be the ability to review what you have learned. To step back when necessary. To accept that the context has changed, and that the answer probably should change too.
Adam Grant talks about this in Think Again: a true expert is not the one who has all the answers, but the one who knows how to rethink them. Not out of insecurity, but out of responsibility.
The same applies to experience. Accumulating years does not guarantee much if there is no conscious effort to improve. Some time ago I saw a sentence on LinkedIn that captured this perfectly: “You can have ten years of experience, or one year of experience repeated ten times.”
And here, too, the abundance of information does not help as much as we might think. Accessing more content does not mean understanding better. We can consume a lot and still think very little. The key is knowing what to do with what we know.
A common misconception about expertise
There is a question that is being asked more and more openly: if two people can reach the same result, why should one be worth more than the other?
This question appears very clearly in an article by Ravikiran Kalluri, when a CEO asks why they should pay for experience if a junior profile can get similar insights with the help of AI.
The problem is not the question itself, but the assumption behind it. For many people, what matters is the final output. What is delivered.
But the real value of an expert is in what you don’t see. In the questions they ask before. In what they discard. In the risks they detect. In the consequences they anticipate. In everything that never makes it into the final presentation. Today, this is often mistaken for noise.
In this sense, Matthew Syed distinguishes between real skill and performative skill. Real skill is usually hard to spot and does not need to be constantly displayed. Performative skill, on the other hand, lives from visibility.
In a world where competence can be easily simulated, real expertise often goes unnoticed.
What it means to know more
Talking about expertise also means talking about responsibility.
Knowing more does not only expand your options, it also reduces your excuses. The expert sees risks where others see simple opportunities. They notice limits that are not always comfortable to point out. And very often, they have to stand by uncomfortable decisions.
In Mindset, Carol Dweck describes the expert not as someone who has reached a final point, but as someone committed to continuous learning. Not to perfection, but to growth.
This idea feels especially relevant today. Expertise is not about proving that you already know, but about accepting that there is always something left to learn. Knowledge does not protect you from error, but it does force you to relate to it honestly.
Maybe that is why modern expertise looks less like a position of authority and more like an ethical practice: a balance between knowing, deciding, and taking responsibility for the consequences.
From tower to bridge
There is an image that I find especially useful to close all this. Adam Grant suggests that the modern expert is no longer a tower of knowledge, but a bridge. Not someone who stands above others, but someone who connects ideas, contexts and different perspectives.
This fits very well with the view of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argued that understanding the implicit rules of an environment is just as important as mastering technical knowledge. Knowing how things actually work, beyond how they are supposed to work.
With all this in mind, I increasingly feel that expertise is not measured by how much someone knows, but by how they move in imperfect and changing contexts. By their ability to read the environment, to ask the right questions, and to act with judgment when there are no obvious solutions.
The expert today is not the one who has all the answers, but the one who understands which question really matters at each moment.