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There is a moment in every ambitious person’s life where the illusion breaks.
You grow up assuming that somewhere, at the top of the food chain, there is a room full of adults who know exactly what they’re doing. That licensed professionals understand their field. That if a founder, investor, or mentor speaks with absolute, unflinching certainty, they have the data to back it up.
And then you actually get into the room.
You discover that the multi-billion-dollar fintech darling with flawless public branding is, internally, not a well-oiled machine - it’s running on vibes and duct tape. Startup engineers are sitting idle because founders who just successfully sold a company have absolutely zero vision for what comes next. Licensed accountants confidently misclassify a standard startup legal document, effectively tank a company’s financials for three years, and fight to the death just to avoid admitting they didn’t read a new clause in the fine print.
It’s not that expertise is a myth. Real experts absolutely exist, and you will need them.
But what that room reveals is that competence and certainty are not the same thing.
People play characters. They put on the costume of expertise and use absolute certainty as a shield against their own gaps in knowledge.
We have built a business culture that practically worships certainty. We reward the people who sound the most confident. But if you want to actually build something new, protect yourself from bad actors, and see reality clearly, rigid certainty is the exact thing you need to start treating as a red flag.
Here is how to navigate a world where it’s hard to tell the real experts from the people faking it.
When you’re doing something that has never been done before - building a new product, starting a new relationship, creating something new - everyone will have an opinion. Peers, investors, friends and family will flood you with advice.
But here’s the problem: advice is fundamentally useless if the context isn't identical.
If you’re buying a plane ticket and someone who flies a lot tells you to clear your browser cookies and go into incognito mode so the algorithm doesn’t hike the price - you should probably listen to them. Things like flight bookings and tax codes are specific, repeatable loops with new rules added occasionally, and results often come from not reinventing the wheel.
But what if you’re inventing the wheel for the first time? Things like startups and human dynamics operate in a fundamentally different way. Taking definitive advice from someone who spent five minutes looking at a novel problem you’ve spent five years living is like taking astrophysics lessons from a kid who just watched a sci-fi cartoon.
So to actually extract value from other people’s genuine expertise, you have to shift how you interact with it.
Don’t ask for advice, ask for the story.
If a founder tells you, “You must vest equity on a four-year cliff,” the advice itself is rigid, it’s just a rule they’re regurgitating. But if you ask how they came to that conclusion, you get the actual data: “I gave a co-founder 40% on day one, they quit on day five, and I spent the next three years working myself to the bone while they owned half my company.”
The story contains the variables. The story allows you to see the underlying mechanics of human behavior. It allows you to see the underlying mechanics of human behavior, so you can adapt the core lesson to your unique situation instead of blindly following a playbook written for a game you aren’t playing.
When you step into a space where the established playbooks don’t apply, you have to rely on your own internal radar. But modern culture has trained us to deeply distrust our intuition. To rationalize it away.
We meet someone in a business meeting or a hobby class who says all the right things and there’s nothing obviously wrong with them. But something in the air shifts when they speak. Something about the baseline is off. Yet we tell ourselves to be reasonable. They didn't do anything wrong. I'm overthinking it. I need hard proof.
But intuition is not paranoia. It is an evolutionary pattern-recognition algorithm.
Thousands of years ago, human survival depended on the ability to scan a landscape and notice if a single leaf moved in a way that didn't match the wind. You didn't need to see the lion to know it was there; you just needed to spot the micro-deviation from the baseline.
That hardware still runs in your brain, picking up micro-expressions, tonal shifts, and body language that your conscious mind is simply too slow to process.
Some time ago I met a person who was highly respected within their community. On paper, they were collaborative and friendly. But a subtle interaction left me with a cold feeling I couldn’t articulate. I trusted that feeling and quietly distanced myself. Months later I found out that this person had been caught on film engaging in deeply coercive behavior behind closed doors. My impression of them as a wolf in sheep’s clothing turned out to be correct.
That was my internal pattern recognition keeping me out of the blast radius of a threat. People can fake a script, but they cannot fake a baseline.
However - your gut is not a substitute for due diligence.
Trusting your gut doesn't mean blindly believing every feeling you have. F*ck around and find out has its limits after all, especially when the consequences of a wrong choice are much greater.
Your gut is the alarm bell - it tells you where to aim your research. It flags the anomaly so your intellect can go investigate it.
So how do we process a world where authority is sometimes a facade, and our own internal algorithm is just the starting point?
It requires shifting your cognitive framework from the interrogator to the investigator.
The core distinction between them comes down to their ultimate goal.
The interrogator wants certainty.
They start with a conclusion - a reality they need to be true. When they look at the world, they are trying to force reality to conform to their narrative. They’re experts in confirmation bias. If a piece of evidence doesn’t fit their theory, they dismiss it.
The investigator wants accuracy.
The real experts in any field are investigators. They start blind, letting the clues dictate the picture - even if that makes the picture messier.
Imagine waking up blindfolded. You smell salt in the air. You feel a cool breeze. You feel sand under your feet. The obvious conclusion is: I am on a beach.
But then, you smell fresh lilies. Lilies don’t grow naturally on a saltwater beach.
As an interrogator, you’ve already decided that you’re on a beach. So you rationalize the contradiction: someone brought flowers to the beach to mess with me. You dismiss the anomaly to protect your certainty.
As an investigator, however, the contradiction becomes the most important point in your data. It might be the case that someone brought lilies to the beach. Or, your initial theory might be entirely wrong.
If you loosen your grip on the beach theory, entirely new realities open up. Maybe you aren’t outside at all. Maybe you’re in an indoor wave pool that’s been decorated for an event. Maybe you're standing on the shore of a freshwater lake where lilies bloom, and the breeze is carrying the distinct, mineral-rich scent from an exposed natural salt deposit.
Maybe it’s a possibility you haven’t even thought of.
Investigators don’t ignore contradictions; they triangulate them. They actively work against their own cognitive biases. And most importantly, they are deeply comfortable with saying, “I don't know.”
This is exactly what the modern world cannot stand.
If you want to test the true competence of a professional, watch their reaction when you say, “I don't know. I have these three facts, but I'm clearly missing something. What am I not seeing?”
A real expert will lean in and say, “Let's look at the data and figure it out.”
A fake expert, on the other hand, will react with visceral anger. They will try to make you feel incompetent for simply doing your due diligence. Because admitting uncertainty threatens their fragile, black-and-white world, and holds up a mirror to the fact that they are mostly guessing, too.
Refusing to play the certainty game is the ultimate advantage. Let the fake experts cling to their confirmation bias. Let the insecure founders play characters.
If you want to actually reach your goals, stop looking for someone to hand you a flawless map. Find the real experts who are willing to navigate the gray areas with you. Trust your gut enough to spot the anomalies, do your own due diligence, and whatever you do - keep investigating.
Because the moment you stop looking is the moment you stop learning. And in a world that’s constantly evolving, the person who stops learning is already obsolete.
Rooting for the real (and uncertain) you,
Hanna from Pulse
