The Joy of Collaboration

Learning what others know that we do not is one of the oldest challenges of mankind. We do it:

• to collaborate—get help with what we cannot do by ourselves,

• to learn—discover what we might do, and

• to preserve—sustain practices that we admire.

Five-hundred years ago, we began to obscure the origin of expertise by referring to inborn talent rather than self-directed learning. In the last century, we began to reduce our estimate of others to numbers on an IQ test or worse yet, to merely once passing a board exam. Today, our distraction from each other’s accomplishments is enhanced by anonymous answers from internet searches and “artificial intelligence” queries.

But the development of expertise goes on. We still become attracted to particular practices, face dilemmas when we can’t perform like others, and seek to learn from others’ experiences. We practice, becoming faster and more accurate with each occasion, until another dilemma starts us on the path of learning a whole new way to perform.

We hope this site intrigues you, reminds you, guides you, and reconnects you to the wonders of learning about fields of expertise, no matter how much or little you have already learned.