May 12, 2026
Two Degrees and Everything They Did Not Teach Me
I have an engineering degree and a law degree. On paper, that is a person who should be able to solve almost anything. In practice, the two of them together did not prepare me for most of the decisions that actually mattered.
Industrial and systems engineering taught me to model a process and find the constraint. Law school taught me to build an argument and anticipate the counter. Both were real competence. Both were also narrow. Neither one taught me how to tell whether the person across the table was bluffing, when a project was quietly dead, or how to keep a team steady when the plan fell apart in the second week.
Competence is one of the quieter parts of what I write about in The Illusion of Luck. People treat it as the whole game. Get the credential, acquire the skill, and the outcomes should follow. But competence is a filter, not a guarantee. It gets you into the room. It does not tell you what to do once you are there.
The competence that compounds is rarely the kind that fits on a resume. It is the judgment you build by being wrong in public and adjusting. It is the pattern recognition that only comes from reps. A degree signals that you can learn. What you do with that capacity, in situations no syllabus ever covered, is where the real separation happens.
If you are waiting to feel fully qualified before you act, you will be waiting a long time. The qualification you are looking for gets built mostly on the other side of starting.
More on this in the book
The Illusion of Luck lays out where competence carries you and where it stops. Chapter One is free.