Incompetent people are unable to judge the competence of others, or the quality of their ideas. /via @ryanmark

From a norsekink prompt, in which Odin's plans for Loki come to naught, and Odin discards him.

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Odin's plans don't pan out as intended, and Thor's de-douche-ification plays differently as a result, and Loki spends most of the story in a box. STORY OF MY HEART.

via hackernews

Starts out in media res and builds the story around you as it goes. The main POV is Sam's, and she's great here; everyone is, with competence out the wazoo. The team is offworld on a first contact mission that goes bad. Good stuff! 23,400 words, in 4 LJ posts (comm: sg1teamficathon); only on LJ as far as I can tell.

Andy raises some thought-provoking questions about the legal profession and has motivated some pretty good discussion and commentary. In fact, it was one of Andy’s comments that motivated me to write this post:

How does the general public know which lawyers are competent now? A lawyer is presumed competent if she has a law license. A new lawyer with zero experience in child protection law can take just such a case. It’s possible that lawyer might face discipline after she botches the case, but does that help the client she failed? Does her discipline protect the public from the next new lawyer?

Five ways you can feel as competent as you really are

Everything in Terri’s earlier advice, especially a shield of arrogance.
I’m not saying you need a thick skin. That’s maybe true, but it won’t help your confidence nearly as much as the ability to say, “screw you; I’m awesome.” Shield of arrogance it is.

If you are worried about being confidently wrong sometimes, note that a small increase in confident wrong assertions is a small price to pay for a big increase in capability, correct assertions, momentum, and achievement.

Know that sometimes thoughts come from feelings, not the other way around. The “I suck” feeling does not necessarily have a basis, just as good weather and ephemeral physiology can put you on top of the world. Instead of looking for reasons that you feel mildly down or incapable, consider disregarding them, acting, and seeing if your feelings dissipate.
If you feel compelled to go from success to success, you may not be risking enough. As these entrepreneurs do, try assuming that you will fail the first time you try something.
Every endeavor that anyone has ever done is therefore in some sense No Big Deal, that is, doable. Some people make the hard look easy, but experience and effort make for far greater variation than does innate ability — or, at least, isn’t it more useful to assume so? Watch other people succeed, and watch other people fail. Mere life experience helped me out here, but so did Project Runway, where I saw good people trying and failing every single week. And so did seeing these guys, at the meetup, at the job interview, being dumber than me. I just had to keep my eyes open and it happened, because I am smarter than the average bear.
Notice the things you know. A friend of mine recently mentioned to me that she worries that people perceive her as incompetent if she asks more than two questions about a hard problem via her company’s internal IRC channel. I asked her to compare how many questions she asks and answers on IRC each day. She hadn’t even been considering that ratio, because she’d unthinkingly assumed that what she knew must be basic, and blabbing about the stuff she already knows is easy and natural and unremarkable. But upon consideration, she’s a good peer in that informational ecology, seeding more than she leeches.

The Flexibility of the Four Stages of Competence

I suck at Photoshop. For years, I've posted ugly images alongside Lifehacker posts because I'm not a designer, and whenever I put a little effort into composing an image to go along with a post, it never magically looked incredible. The reality: I was lazy. I may never be Massimo Vignelli, but that doesn't mean I should remain a design idiot my entire life. More »

I suck at Photoshop. For years, I've posted ugly images alongside Lifehacker posts because I'm not a designer, and whenever I put a little effort into composing an image to go along with a post, it never magically looked incredible. The reality: I was lazy. I may never be Massimo Vignelli, but that doesn't mean I should remain a design idiot my entire life. More »