The Ant Model of Career Building

I recently have gained great interest in the Dunning-Kruger effect.  The oldest reference to this effect might be the story of The Emperor's New Clothes.  The emperor is vain, listens to his advisors too much without doing any work himself, and parades himself naked in front of the whole city while children exclaim "he's not wearing anything!"

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon where people assess themselves as being more competent in a given field than they actually are.  They continue to have this high self-assessment even after repeated failures.  They've taken a test, scored low, and even after seeing the test results continue to have a high self-assessment.  The only remedy is when what they should have done is explained to them and they finally admit "I'm not really good at this at all" even though actually, now that it's been explained, they understand the process better than they had before.

This is going to happen at all levels.  I've read a PhD in chemistry's serious paper about biomorphs in nanoparticles - without it ever being mentioned: this work has no practical application.  [She was my last girlfriend.]

So of course I have to sometimes wonder - just how much of an emperor with no clothes am I?  Just how big are my blind spots?  It can be a worrisome question.  And this model is reinforced by almost every corporate culture I've been in to varying degrees.  The worst were psychopathic - where under-performers were harassed into leaving.  I really don't have any answer to this from a top-down perspective.  There will always be psychopaths.  There will always be high performers and low performers.

The only useful model I have to work with right now is what I'll call "The Ant" model.  That means just do the work that's in front of you, without worrying about what other people think, or even making comparisons.  All that little ant has to go by is some little pheromone trail he needs to follow.  It's all very clear and simple.  And life goes by very quickly.

Beside all the worry and internal concerns, the work that is done by any single person is no different than the work done by an ant.  Their lives are really not so different.  I like this model mostly because it's selfless, and liberating.  A happy, liberated ant, is a productive ant.