Recently I had come across a few podcasts, shows, and instances in my own life where I’ve seen and heard of super smart people wasting a lot of time doing things they really think their time is worth spending on doing themselves. 

I intentionally carefully worded that sentence. It’s an interesting observation of how people spend their time. Now, I don’t like to consider myself super smart – I’m just your average guy, and I by no means am a subject matter expert on most things or anything for that matter. When I look at this part of my personality and who I am, I actually consider myself very blessed, lucky, and very happy that I am not a super smart person. I remember walking out of my Calc IV class at CalPoly because I knew on the first day that the squiggly line on the chalkboard with greek letters all over it was something I simply did not want to have in my brain. I figured that there were people who were actually into this stuff who would excel at it far better than I ever would.

And luckily, I was right.

Whether it be to pride, or an actual need to save money, you see it all the time where people just feel compelled to try to tackle certain tasks themselves. These certain tasks are those that they know that others can do much better and faster, but due to the prospect of the relinquishing of money, they would rather spend their own time and sweat equity trying to figure out the task themselves. Invariably these tasks require more time than if the experts took them on, and oftentimes cause inaccuracies that require the expert to take on the task anyway later on – or worse, there are consequences that arise from doing the task incorrectly. At the end, it’s a gamble on whether the layperson can perform a given task that is outside of his expertise.

Yet, people do it all the time.

I have a friend who is a rocket scientist. He is actually a rocket scientist. He’s a super smart guy, a nice guy at that. Great personality, and a very deep person. However, he has an insatiable need to be in control of things. One of those things are taxes. Due to a few investments he has, his tax situation is actually quite complex. However, he figures himself to be good with numbers (he has an EE background), and has been doing his taxes for many years now. However, he’s a busy man. He’s got a day job, and he’s got a social life. And when April 15 rolls around, he insists on scrambling to put the numbers together. He believes it’s easy, and within his capability. So, he spends the time to do the numbers with the taxman, while saving the $350-400 it would have cost to have a CPA do it all for him. He had been doing taxes himself for years without a hitch, so I had thought he had become an expert at doing it.

However this year, he was audited by the IRS. He’s about to have someone come to his house and go through his files and likely issue a judgement that includes a penalty fine.

Now, this particular individual has historically been unlucky at getting caught while trying to get away with random things here and there, but this time, it was an illustration of the eventual inevitability of the consequences experienced by a non-expert wasting time doing a task that could be much more efficiently and accurately performed by a true expert. In other words, in trying to save a defined amount of money, he expended an undefined amount of time and effort to accomplish a task that could have been performed with speed and accuracy (and in this case, compliance). Due to his error, he now has to spend more time, money, and effort to defend his position in the audit, all of which could have probably been avoided had he hired the expert in the first place. And now, he’s in for the double whammy of having to spend more money, time and effort overall – and now possible prosecution.

The moral of the story is this: If you aren’t good at something, find the expert who can do it well and fast, and pay that person to do it for you. It’s a benefit to have an expert’s outcome on a task, but more importantly, it allows you to free up your time to do the things that really matter, and that are more in your control and wheelhouse. Ultimately, it saves you the headache of trying to figure something out yourself, and the peace of mind knowing that your task is in good hands. It’s actually worth the money in most cases.

It’s an odd thing to me – it seems that super smart people, especially the academics coming out of ivy league halls, are especially susceptible to the “I can do everything” fallacy. Perhaps it’s a certain sense of pride that comes with high accomplishment that drives them to think this way, that they have to do everything themselves. When I see this, I’m actually thankful that there are experts that love their craft. If everyone was an average joe like me, then we’d be in trouble because there’d be no experts doing tasks well. And when I’m in the doctor’s office, I hope that person is certainly an EXPERT!

However, if you ask me to do my taxes, may God save my soul. I have no idea what a 1040 is from a Schedule K (actually I kind of do now that my CPA has educated me). But I rest easy knowing those numbers are being crunched just right. I just sign the papers when he’s done.

When the super smart people get snarky about their intelligence, I look at the tasks they perform day in, day out. Oftentimes, it’s amusing to watch. 🙂