The Illusion of Expertise
What the Dunning-Kruger Effect Steals from Solopreneurs
In the early days of building my business, I was certain I knew what I was doing. I could talk the talk, quote the gurus, and run the funnels.
For a while, it looked like it was working—clients came in, revenue grew, confidence ballooned.
But underneath the surface, something felt off. The more I learned, the more I realized how much I didn’t know.
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That’s when I collided with the Dunning-Kruger Effect—not in a psychology textbook, but in the mirror.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect describes a simple but unsettling truth: we often overestimate our competence when we lack enough knowledge to see the full picture. In solopreneurship, this effect shows up as false confidence in strategies that don’t serve us, in chasing what looks good instead of what works, and in mistaking activity for progress.
It’s a paradox.
The less we know, the more certain we feel.
But as we gain experience, our certainty takes a hit. We start seeing nuance. We recognize tradeoffs. We stop looking for the one right move and start focusing on right relationship between our time, our energy, and our true priorities.
In my journey, this has meant shedding the illusion that success was just one funnel, one email sequence, or one power offer away.
It meant confronting the reality that I didn’t need more tactics. I needed more truth.
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I needed to engage the field, test what I thought I knew, and be willing to embrace being wrong on the way to being real.
The frameworks I now live by (like Close the Gap and Engaging the Field) aren’t hacks. They’re invitations to deeper knowing, grounded in action. They remind me that:
You become the thing by doing the thing.
Intelligence is your ability to get what you want.
Learning is demonstrated through improved behavior.
This is why many solopreneurs hit a ceiling. They know about business but haven’t fully embodied their role as business owners.
They’re stuck in chauffeur knowledge, as Charlie Munger calls it: good at sounding smart, but untested in the real world. What they need is Planck knowledge—earned wisdom, rooted in reality.
If any of this rings true, you’re not alone. And you’re not lacking. You may simply be further along the path than you thought.
The way forward isn’t more consumption. It’s more integration. More reflection. More aligned execution.
That’s exactly what we practice inside the Solopreneur Success Circle. It’s not another course or content dump. It’s a space for high-integrity solopreneurs to walk the path of mastery together with support, structure, and shared wisdom.
If you're ready to build a business that funds and fits your ideal lifestyle—without burning out or selling out, I invite you to join us:
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Needing more truth instead of more tactics, damn. That's so true itself.
Intelligence is your ability to get what you want. What a gem.