The Perils of Being a Guinea Pig in Your Own Experiment

Last month, I wrote the website copy for a small architecture firm in Chicago. This company is known for its green building expertise and commitment to environmental sustainability. Now, they wanted to position themselves as leaders in a broader, human-centered sense of sustainability. I don't know anything about architecture, although I can positively identify a McMansion when I see one. But I do know how to get smart about areas that are new to me. I produced a first draft, optimized for their target SEO keywords, then a revised draft based on the client's feedback. This project took less than two weeks. And yet, I've been working on the copy for my own website for three months now.

I'm a brand strategist, copywriter, and communications consultant. When I sat down to do some market research to inform a brand refresh and repositioning for my business, I thought it would be a three-month project, undertaken between paying freelance assignments. Today, it's fourteen months later, and it's finally time to launch the new Clew — not because I have confidence that I've arrived at the right place, but because you have to start before you can make it good.

Sometimes, being an expert in your field doesn't help. Sometimes, it hurts.

In 1900, U.S. Army Surgeon Jesse Lazear was part of Walter Reed's team investigating how Yellow Fever spread. When presented with a theory that mosquitoes transmitted the disease, Lazear, an expert in mosquito-borne diseases who had worked on malaria, took charge of the experiments. But after months of careful work with no results, his expertise may have become his blind spot. Rather than stepping back to reassess his methodology, he made the fateful decision to let an infected mosquito feed on his arm. Days later, Jesse Lazear was dead at age 34.

The tragedy wasn't just in Lazear's death, but in how his expertise may have contributed to his tunnel vision. A frustrated Walter Reed wrote in a letter that Lazear's case couldn't even be used as scientific proof because he'd been bitten at a yellow fever hospital. There were too many unknown factors to make any conclusions.

“If you, my dear doctor, had prior to your bite remained at the camp for 10 days, then we would have a clear case. But you didn't. You went just where you might have contracted the disease from another source. And what about Jesse Lazear? According to his own account, he'd been bitten while at a yellow fever hospital for goodness sake. That knocks his case out. I mean, as a thoroughly scientific experiment.”

Excerpted from a letter to U.S. Army Physician James Carroll from Walter Reed

By refusing to see that I was too close to my own project, I let the mosquito bite me again and again. Fortunately, the results weren't deadly in my case, but there was a tremendous opportunity cost to what I wasn't working on during the fourteen months I chased my own tail.

It's difficult to ask for help. It feels particularly inane to ask for help in an area where you have years of experience. But expertise can become a cage that traps us in our own assumptions. Sometimes the most valuable skill isn't knowing everything about your field — it's knowing when to step back and let fresh eyes see what you can't.

The irony isn't lost on me that I help other businesses gain perspective on their brands and communication strategies every day. Yet when it came to my own business, I got lost in the weeds. Sometimes expertise isn't enough. Sometimes, what you really need is distance.

Expertise is one thing; wisdom is another. It takes wisdom to know when we're too close to see clearly, and humility to admit it. The greatest work often emerges not from showcasing what we know, but from being willing to be humbled by what we don't. So here's to starting before it's perfect, to asking for help even when our expertise tells us we shouldn't need it, and to remembering that sometimes the bravest thing we can do is admit we've lost our perspective.

Call to Curiosity: Jesse Lazear’s sacrifice is memorialized at Washington National Cathedral and on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. Was Lazear an American hero who made the ultimate sacrifice, or a brilliant mind whose contributions to modern medicine were preempted by his own obsession and arrogance?