The Consultant’s Paradox: Staying Teachable in a World That Rewards Certainty
Why curiosity matters more than mastery
I was sitting in the back of a ballroom at a CoStar national sales conference in 2007. The research director clicked through charts—early tremors of what became the 2008 crash. I remember watching him talk and thinking, this industry isn’t as stable as everyone here believes.
That was the moment I realized that career success isn’t about climbing higher—it’s about learning to move when the ground shifts.
No Blueprint, Just Work
When I graduated college, I didn’t have a grand vision for my career. What I did know was that I never wanted to spend my life in a job I hated. My father had done that, and I saw what it cost him.
So I worked. I dug ditches in Los Angeles. I loaded trucks in warehouses. I landscaped front yards in the Georgia heat. Those jobs taught me humility and the satisfaction of work done well—no glamour, just grit.
Later, when I moved into my first GIS role, I tried (and failed) to implement a Huff model in Esri’s ArcView. At the time, I assumed I could figure it out easily. I couldn’t. Maybe it was the tool; maybe it was me. Either way, I learned: competence isn’t mastery, and mastery isn’t certainty.
The Pivots
The biggest pivots in my career have always started as a hunch.
Commercial real estate → web development → management consulting. Each one a kind of reinvention.
Underneath every pivot was a simple wager: I’d bet on myself. Not on perfect timing, not on insider access—on my capacity to learn faster than the terrain could change. Leaving commercial real estate for the web, and later for consulting, wasn’t bravado; it was risk with receipts. Curiosity compounds. The upside of movement was growth; the downside of staying put was slow decay. Once I saw that trade clearly, the bet got easier to place.
In commercial real estate, I noticed something that bothered me. Success often had as much to do with access and networks as it did with ability. That’s not inherently wrong—it’s simply the reality of how relationships and reputation drive that industry. But for someone like me, without that inherited network, I realized I’d need to build credibility a different way—through skills, curiosity, and reliability.
So I started looking for something new. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted next. But I knew what I didn’t want: to stay somewhere that rewarded access over effort. That impulse—listening to the small warning signs before they become a crisis—has probably saved my career a few times.
People often assume that changing fields means starting over.
It doesn’t. It means reapplying curiosity in new directions.
Emotional Intelligence Over Expertise
I’ve seen too many technically brilliant people fail because they never learned to listen. They want to build solutions before they understand the problem. In consulting, that’s fatal. Betting on yourself isn’t chest-thumping; it’s ownership—listen hard, adjust fast, ship again.
Emotional intelligence isn’t a soft skill. It’s knowing when to talk and when to stay quiet. It’s reading the room, asking good questions, and knowing when to say, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”
Younger consultants often fall into the same trap I did years ago: mistaking articulation for understanding. They think the way to prove themselves is to fill the silence. But real expertise sounds like curiosity. The smartest person in the room isn’t the one talking—it’s the one listening.
Over time, I’ve learned that humility isn’t self-deprecation; it’s self-awareness.
Curiosity as the Competitive Advantage
If there’s a single throughline in my career, it’s curiosity. It’s what pulled me from maps (and the world of commercial real estate that sat somewhere between maps and code) to software, and from software to consulting, and now into the world of AI and automation.
This week, I spent an entire day using ChatGPT and AI tools to accelerate my work—completing in a day what would normally take me a week. It reawakened the energy of my early career—when learning itself felt intoxicating.
Curiosity keeps you young. It also makes the self-bet rational: the more I learn, the better the odds get.
For me, that means reading obsessively—magazines, journals, online papers—then meeting friends and talking about what we’re all learning. Those conversations spark new ideas and keep the work fresh.
The day I stop learning is the day I stop earning the right to lead.
Beatitudes for the Workplace
Blessed are the humble.
Blessed are those who listen.
Blessed are those willing to learn new things, constantly.
Blessed are those who refuse to pretend they know everything.
Blessed are those who take smart risks and own the results.
These are the workplace virtues that matter most. They sound old-fashioned, but they’re not. They’re the foundation of every thriving career—and every healthy company culture.
Defining Success on My Own Terms
Looking back, I realize my career has never followed a neat trajectory. To some, it might look unplanned. But I see a pattern: every good thing in my career has come through relationships, not résumé lines.
That’s why I believe relationships and people matter more than process, performance metrics, or career theories. Titles fade. Markets crash. Skills evolve. Curiosity, humility, and kindness still scale. When the ground shifts, I’ll do what I’ve always done—place a quiet bet on myself, then get back to work.
Question for readers: What would change in your work if you stopped trying to be the expert and started being the learner again?