Let me introduce you to Jennifer W. She's a Local Guide with 117 reviews and a lot of opinions about the Great Pyramids of Giza. Specifically, she'd like to know why no one has updated the architecture, whether management has considered a fresh coat of paint, and what exactly is going on with the local signage - "what's with all the squiggles and dots." The squiggles and dots are Arabic, Jennifer. You're in Egypt.

She gave it one star.

Ooga Booga thinks they should have made it bigger and next time, a cube would be better. Tennyson Jane was upset by the sand and that they couldn't climb it like in Assassin's Creed. Jonah Somdahl would like you to know they could build this in Minecraft in about 30 seconds.

I posted a reel about these last week - the point being, if these people feel confident enough to post their thoughts, you can too. 

Not one of those reviewers overthought anything - no "to be fair," or "I may be missing something here." Just a clean, confident verdict on a 4,500-year-old structure that required the coordinated labor of tens of thousands of people and engineering that still isn't fully understood. 

One star. Too pointy. Meanwhile, people who have spent years actually understanding something are the ones who hesitate. The people with the least reason to have certainty about something, seem to have it the most.

In clinical practice, "always" and "never" are genuinely dangerous words. They set expectations that reality will likely not honor. I had it trained out of me as a safety measure - you didn't know when your patient's specific case would be the exception to everything you were taught. You learn to say "in most cases" and "the evidence suggests" and "we'll need to see how you respond" because the alternative is making promises that the complexity of human biology will eventually break.

That reflex is often correct in a clinical context (see? Often correct, not always correct. I can’t help myself 😅). But, I find that the reflex doesn’t know if I’ve left that building. It follows me to my desk, into my drafts, onto the internet - where a confident declarative sentence is exactly how you get heard. And there I am, softening lines I actually believe, adding qualifiers to ideas I've thought about for years, reading a sentence back three times wondering if it's too absolute.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how people with limited knowledge in a domain tend to overestimate their competence, while people with genuine expertise tend to underestimate theirs - because expertise reveals how much there is to know. The better you understand something, the more clearly you can see its edges, its exceptions, the places where a clean claim starts to fray. 

In other words, the more you master something, the less certain you become.

You see this everywhere once you know to look for it. The best mentors in the branding and marketing space, the ones who've actually worked with hundreds of people across different industries, life stages and contexts, will almost always tell you "there's no single right answer, it depends." The person three months in will tell you exactly what to do with complete confidence. 

The seasoned therapist will say that every client is different and the research is messier than the popular online version suggests. The experienced plumber or contractor won't quote you until they've seen what's actually going on, because they've opened up enough walls to know that what looks like one problem usually has two others hiding behind it. The more certain someone sounds, the less they've probably wrestled with it.

This is, I believe, different from impostor syndrome, which comes up a lot in these conversations. It’s not quite the same. Impostor syndrome is about not believing you're competent. What I'm describing is almost the opposite - knowing your subject well enough that a bold claim feels like a small dishonesty, which in the online content world reads exactly like self-doubt.

So you end up in a strange place. The people most qualified to speak are often the most careful, and careful reads as uncertain. Jennifer W has filed 117 confident reviews and will file more. She didn't let not knowing what “squiggles and dots” were slow her down for a second. Arabic language is not a signage failure.

Wait, I can hear the objection: But Ellen, what if I end up posting something that sounds just as ridiculous? 

Trust me, you won’t. You're not N.