Want to achieve? Learn the four stages 🎯 Wednesday Win

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Want to achieve at a high level and build expert skills at something meaningful? You'll need to climb through the Four Stages of Competence. This powerful roadmap to mastery is a guide to understanding how we integrate our knowledge and intuition to perform at a high level consistently.

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The Four Stages mental model for learning is my favorite way to prepare for the necessary work when I tackle something new or reinforce my learning where I already have expertise. Let's explore:

Understanding the framework

The Four Stages of Competence can be best shown as a pyramid that one climbs when learning any new significant skill.

We'll explore each level, but first recognize we start at the base. As we learn and take action, climb from stage to stage. At the top, we reach mastery and our regular practice yields good decisions and good actions in that domain.

Consider the stages:

Unconscious Incompetence
Conscious Incompetence
Conscious Competence
Unconscious Competence

Diagram of the 4 stages of rising competence in the form of a triangle with four levels rising from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. — The Four Stages of Competence

Let's dive into each stage.

1. Unconscious Incompetence

At the start, we have a lack of knowledge and no good basis to make intuitive decisions. Often at this stage, we are worse than neutral on the subject as we're likely to make poor decisions and take lower value actions because we misapply our knowledge and skills from other domains.

If we've only ever used a hammer and nails, when we encounter a screw for the first time, we're more likely to try to pound it in with our hammer than realize we need to find a screwdriver instead.

At this stage, we have the wrong intuition and need to learn through knowledge acquisition and empirical experience.

Diagram of the 4 stages of rising competence in the form of a triangle with four levels with only the unconscious incompetence layer label visible.

2. Conscious Incompetence

As we experiment and continue our training, we begin to see the limits and gaps in our knowledge and abilities. At this second stage, we begin to improve our performance and recognize what we still have to learn.

Our intuition improves, but our analysis is still weak.

Diagram of the 4 stages of rising competence in the form of a triangle with four levels with only the conscious incompetence layer label visible.

3. Conscious Competence

Most who study diligently and continue regularly to practice the skills reach this third stage: conscious competence. At this level one understands the fundamentals of the field of study and can apply them consistently. Doing well still requires significant effort at times, but the results are generally good to great.

This is functional competence and reflects how good employees do their work.

This stage is where good analysis lives and where most stop learning.

Diagram of the 4 stages of rising competence in the form of a triangle with four levels with only the conscious competence layer label visible.

4. Unconscious Competence

At this highest stage, something magical happens. This is where the 10x-ers live: unconscious competence. This is where the knowledge and experience have been built to such a level that not only is the output good, it's often innovative or seemingly counter-intuitive, but consistently correct in their approach.

This is where intuition or the power of the subconscious mind kicks in and delivers a steady stream of valuable ideas.

We've all seen people who live in this space for some area of their life. The musician who can just pick up an instrument and create something interesting on the spot. The copywriter who can generate novel framing for a new product. Or the engineer who can create a novel architecture for a problem that's been stubbornly resistant to conventional solutions.

This is the level to seek for those top priorities in your life
Study and do the necessary work to build up not just ability, but intuitive understanding of your field
Seek out those at this level as partners and colleagues to accelerate your own learning
To be truly excellent, this is the target to reach

Diagram of the 4 stages of rising competence in the form of a triangle with four levels with only the unconscious competence layer label visible.

Action Summary

To be outstanding in your chosen area of interest, you need to climb through the stages. While not everyone's pace is the same, the path does require the same steps: gaining knowledge and building experience through application of that knowledge.

As Jim Rohn said, you can't expect to harvest to crop before you sow the seeds. You must first put in the work.

Learn and practice
Build a network of support from others who have excelled in the same domain
Seek true mastery in the areas that matter most to you and align with your priorities
Share what you've learned to help others earlier on the journey