People Who Are Smarter Than I Am
I have realized that some people are smarter than I am. It is a painful realization but I just can’t ignore the evidence any longer. Allow me to explain.
I often get inspiration to write posts from reading books or blogs by really smart people. Thus, I often refer to people who are smarter than me. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to get comments from these people on my posts. While I’m typically rather convinced by my own reasoning when I write the post in question, every time I get such a comment I am struck by how much smarter they are than me.
Recent cases where this has happened:
- Mike Cohns comment on Not Converging on an Estimate: I discussed an adaption of some advice he gave in a book. However, my adaption forced me to ignore other parts of the same advice. He pointed out that there was no problem in actually doing both parts.
- Full Statement Coverage: I wondered why Ron Jeffries was writing such sloppy unit tests in some of his articles. He didn’t seem to test even half of the code he wrote. A short email conversation later I had realized that he of course wasn’t sloppy, but rather just much more clever than I was.
So, I simply hadn’t understood what they meant the first time? I don’t believe it’s as simple as that. I think I did understand. Most of the time anyway. But my level of understanding just wasn’t as deep as theirs.
The upside is that every such moment makes me a little bit smarter! 
Have you experienced a similar situation? What was your latest “revelation”?