Bite the pasta

Why True Understanding Still Requires Real Experience

The False Summit of Expertise

Never before have we had such immediate access to sophisticated knowledge, yet genuine expertise feels increasingly rare. A paradox. AI tools can help us discuss complex topics with remarkable fluency, but the growing confidence-competence gap is more dangerous than we realize.

We all can now absorb Porter's Five Forces framework, competitive analysis templates, and market positioning strategies through AI assistance to articulate sophisticated competitive moats and (true?) differentiation. Yet they've never felt the subtle shift when a market is ready for disruption, never sensed the unspoken concerns in a client meeting, never experienced the humbling reality of watching their perfectly logical strategy crumble against messy human behavior.

AI gives us the vocabulary of expertise without the hard-won understanding that comes from doing.

Knowledge is alive.

Consider product designers who can recite every user experience principle but have never sat quietly in the corner watching someone struggle with their interface. They know about user personas and journey mapping, but they've never felt that gut punch when a user completely ignores their carefully designed flow to create their own workaround.

Or take competitive strategists who can analyze market data and generate insights about positioning, but have never developed the tacit knowledge that comes from repeated exposure to market dynamics. They can tell you about blue ocean strategies but can't sense when a market is holding its breath, waiting for the right moment to embrace something new.

This embodied knowledge can't be transmitted through words alone. It lives in accumulated experience, in pattern recognition that happens below conscious thought, in the wisdom that emerges from sustained engagement with complexity.

Sacrificing the Cognitive Lamb

Here's what worries me most. We're not just using AI for final outputs. In the name of turbocharging productivity, we're outsourcing the thinking process itself.

Research on "desirable difficulties" shows that cognitive struggle isn't a bug in learning, it's a feature. Necessary. When we work through problems ourselves, when we wrestle with confusion and gradually piece together understanding, we're building the mental architecture that enables genuine expertise.

But when we immediately turn to AI for strategies, approaches, automation, we skip the generative confusion where real insights form. We get clean answers while missing the messy, nonlinear process where understanding actually develops.

Think about how mathematicians describe "living with a problem" for months or years. Or how writers talk about ideas that need to "percolate." There's something irreplaceable about the mind's subconscious processing, the powerhouse behind every gut reaction and the AHA moments, making unexpected connections while you're walking or showering.

When we hand this cognitive labor to AI, we rob ourselves of the mental workout that builds real comprehension.

Humility Comes from Doing

Have you ever tried cooking pasta? Seems simple right? Boiling water, salt, throw it in, hit play on Barilla’s playlist or timer, viola. Whether you’re nodding along or feeling the slight rage now is telling of how much you’ve tried to perfect your pasta.

Real experience teaches humility in a way that information never can. When you've actually tried to implement your beautifully logical strategy, you discover realities that hypotheses and simulations can’t predict (yet?). These are the hard pills every experts swallowed, why failure still is the mother of success. And why some people just cant cook even if they have Alain Ducasse giving them step by step instructions, live.

AI makes us confident in our theoretical grasp while leaving us completely unprepared for the unpredictability of real application, brittle ‘knowledge’ that sounds sophisticated eaten up by reality.

So what do we do?

Start with AI, but don't stop there. Use AI to understand frameworks and gather information, but then do the hard work of applying, testing, and refining that plan or essay or theory or proposal through real experience.

Seek out the struggle. When something feels difficult to understand, resist the urge to immediately get an AI explanation. Sit with the confusion. Work through the problem yourself. The struggle is where understanding actually develops.

Cultivate patience with not knowing. In our instant-answer culture, the ability to remain curious and uncertain while working through problems becomes a competitive advantage. Its the trail, not the summit.

Take a bite.

We are in a world where everyone can access the same information. Information alone does not confer advantage it used to. Real understanding and practical application does. Lessons are only learnt when you live through them.

There's no substitute for biting into the pasta yourself.