Four stages of competence

Young people think they know everything.

Of course, that is a wild exaggeration, but many younger people are more confident about life than they should be. That is because many are unaware about how much they do not know. That knowledge tends to come with age and maturity.

In psychology, Abraham Maslow (Yes, the hierarchy of needs guy) stated that we go through 4 stages of competence.

The first is Unconscious Incompetence where we don't know what we don't know. In this stage we are highly confident in our ignorance.

The next stage is Conscious Incompetence where we realize our ignorance, but don't know how to address it. We have not yet learned.

The third stage is Conscious Competence where individuals understand and know how to do things -- but only with conscious effort.

The last stage is Unconscious Competence. At this stage, competence is so ingrained that it is "second nature" and internalized.

When students in the Unconscious Incompetence stage are taught by professors in the Unconscious Competence stage, it can sometimes be a case where a person who thinks they know it all is being taught by someone who has so internalized his knowledge that he can't teach it every well.

This is not the case in all educational situations but it is more common than desirable.