Knowing What Not to Do

Knowing What Not to Do

Every once in a while, you meet a teacher who quietly changes the trajectory of your thinking.

Not with a grand speech.

Not with a groundbreaking theory.

Just a simple observation that follows you for the rest of your life.

For me, that teacher was my major professor at Florida State University, Dr. Frederick W. Bell.

Fred seldom missed a Florida State home basketball game and could rattle off player statistics from memory as easily as most people remember their own phone number. He even authored one of my favorite paper titles in economics - The Pope and the Price of Fish (AER – 1968).  He took economics and teaching economics seriously, but I never got the sense he took himself too seriously.

Looking back, one of Fred's greatest gifts wasn't simply his command of economics.

It was his ability to make difficult ideas seem almost obvious.

One afternoon, he offered a piece of advice that has stayed with me for more than thirty years.

Seek simplicity over complexity.

I remember hearing those words as we pored over reams of regression output fresh off the daisy-wheel printer.

I'm not sure I understood them at the time though.

At that stage of my career, I was captivated by sophisticated analytical methods.

I still am.

There is beauty in elegant mathematics. There is craftsmanship in a well-designed model. Some of the brightest minds I've encountered have solved extraordinarily difficult problems with remarkable sophistication.

Every new technique felt like another instrument I just added to my toolbox.

The toolbox kept growing.

What changed wasn't my appreciation for sophisticated methods.

What changed was my appreciation for when they were actually needed.

Fred belonged to a generation of economists who performed matrix algebra by hand.

Today we ask software to estimate models containing thousands of observations with a few keystrokes.

Fred didn't have that luxury.

He understood the cost of complexity because he had carried it himself.

I've often wondered whether that experience shaped the advice he gave his students.

Early in my career, I thought mastery meant knowing what to do - always.

Learn another technique.

Study another method.

Build another model.

With experience, that definition began to change.

The temptation in analytics is almost always the same.

One more variable.

One more transformation.

One more interaction.

One more model.

Sometimes that's exactly what's required.

But just as often, another model is compensating for a question that wasn't well designed in the first place.

Over the years, I've come to believe that mastery has surprisingly little to do with demonstrating everything you know.

A master woodworker doesn't reach for every tool.

A concert pianist doesn't play every note.

A Michelin-starred chef doesn't use every ingredient.

A tenth-degree judo master doesn't perform every technique they've spent a lifetime learning.

They don't need to.

Their expertise isn't demonstrated by the number of options they possess.

It's demonstrated by the judgment to know which option is sufficient and necessary.

It's demonstrated by knowing what not to do.

I still enjoy learning new analytical methods.

I suspect I always will.

Not because I want a larger toolbox.

Because I want better judgment about which tool a problem actually requires.

Most problems don't require extraordinary sophistication.

The few that do deserve to be met with the right tool.

The analyst's job is knowing the difference.

Looking back, I realize Fred wasn't teaching us to avoid complexity.

He was teaching us to respect it.

To begin with clarity.

To let the problem earn the sophistication it requires.

To seek understanding before elegance.

It took me nearly thirty years to understand the difference.

And it remains one of the most valuable lessons I've ever learned.

Reflection

Where in your own work - or your own life - might expertise be demonstrated not by doing more, but by knowing what not to do?