Payments, ERP, travel, e-commerce, parking, and then back into banking. I have changed domain often enough to know how the first weeks in a new one go, and to know the one move that has never once helped: pretending I already understand it.
So when a piece of work lands in the part of a field I only half know, my answer has settled into a single sentence. Take it, and put the gaps on the table on day one.
- The sentence that makes a gap useful to the people who depend on you, and the phrase that makes it useless.
- What to do in the first twenty-four hours after you find a gap you did not know you had.
- Where the time really goes when you pretend, and the trade I make every time.
Say What You Have Not Done
The gaps have to go on the table specifically. A specific gap is something people can work with. A vague one waits, and ambushes them later.
"I have done A and B. I have not done C. Here is how I would cover C."
That sentence lets people plan around C, put a check where C matters, and stop worrying about A and B. The line people reach for instead is "I am still learning". It tells nobody anything, and the gap it covers tends to surface at the worst possible moment.
I keep a private version of this list: the master, journeyman and apprentice rows of the skill spectrum, which I run against myself. Saying the apprentice row out loud, to the people who are relying on me, is the step that changes what happens next.
Someone to Check Me
Then I get someone who has done C close to the parts where C actually matters. Not to hide behind. To check me.
From the outside the two look the same, which is why the difference is worth saying. Hiding behind an expert means their judgement quietly replaces mine, and I come out the other side knowing no more about C than when I started. Being checked means I still make the call, and someone who has seen C go wrong is standing close enough to catch it before it ships.
The First Twenty-Four Hours
Other gaps show up halfway through, when I realise I am not as strong in an area as I thought I was.
The first few hours are, honestly, a bit of ego management. Nobody enjoys finding the floor lower than they thought it was. I have learned not to make decisions in that window.
Then I go and find the edge of it properly. What exactly don't I know? How far does it spread? Is anything already depending on me knowing it? That last question decides the urgency, and the same day, I tell whoever is relying on me.
Waiting a week can feel kinder, the same way the silence in Your Kindness Is Their Rework feels considerate while you are keeping it. Somebody else pays for both later.
Early, it's a heads up. A week later, it's a problem I sat on.
Learn What Is Necessary Now
Then I close the gap, pragmatically. Find the person who knows, and ask directly. Read the thing properly. Put my hands on it.
Learn what is necessary now, and expand as needed. After enough moves between domains, the thing I notice travelling with me from one to the next is not what I knew in the last one. It is knowing how to learn a domain quickly.
It is exactly how I am learning AI at the moment, which comes with a trap of its own: a model can hand you an answer that feels like understanding before you have earned any, the problem I call borrowed competence.
The Weekend and the Month
Pretending I already know a domain has never once helped me. The gap stays exactly where it was, and the time goes into keeping it out of sight: nodding along, steering every conversation back to A and B, hoping the question about C waits another week. Confidence of that kind is easy to perform, and the people across an interview table learn to look past it. The people who depend on your work find out too. They just find out later.
I'd rather spend a weekend learning something than a month performing it.
Psychology has names for the two directions. In 1988, Elaine Elliott and Carol Dweck set learning goals, aimed at becoming more capable, against performance goals, aimed at being seen as capable. A month spent performing is a performance goal with a calendar attached. A weekend spent learning is the other kind, and it is the one that leaves something behind.