One of the things that keeps showing up over and over in the self-defense training community  is the question of who is exactly a “subject matter expert” (SME) and how they become such.

There is much controversy over things like length of time doing something, how well you do it, and how well you communicate, but sometimes there are some signs that can point to someone who knows what they are doing.

In my opinion, a sure sign of a SME is that they are still working hard to get better even though they have been doing a task for a lengthy time and have accomplished some significant goals. I have trained with a number of great performers in different disciplines and one thing they all have in common is a desire to keep working on their own skill set, and rather than them talking about how great they are, they spend far more time talking about how they need to do more or work harder or find another teacher to help guide them. It is a marked contrast to so much of the typical discourse on social media in our current age.

This was hammered home to me recently when I was listening to a podcast that was interviewing Angus Young from AC/DC. I don’t think that it can be argued that Young is truly an SME of guitar playing and that if he is not one of the greatest guitarists of the past 50 years, then he has certainly been influential and he has a distinctive playing style that separates him from the pack. And yet this guitar great said this:

“I’ve been doing it all this time now, and I’m still learning”

And this is in reference to him playing the band’s own songs, most of which he had a hand in writing and has been performing sometimes nightly since the mid-70’s! And he still is trying to get better at it, and does not think he has reached the stage of knowing it all.

So be like Angus. Stop telling everyone how much you know and what you have done, and instead keep the nose to the grindstone and try to improve on your performance regardless of where everyone else thinks you are. Then, when you do speak, you speak from humbleness and not ego.