Learning About Learning

It’s easy to mistake momentum for meaning. The work is learning to recognize when we’re flowing from intuition and when we’re performing well inside someone else’s system.

Later in my career, I came across a concept in the book The Artist’s Way, by author Julia Cameron* that would name the phase I went through early in my career. I was in a phase of unconscious competence. I applied what I learned from Cameron to my life by recognizing that the early days in in my career were when I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Unconscious competence feels like flight. Like instinct. Like being lit from within.

It’s like a child learning to ski. They don’t fear the mountain. They don’t calculate the risk. They just go, laughing, falling, flying. And it’s beautiful. There’s no imposed standard. No goal setting. No self-monitoring. It’s raw. A natural state. Instinctual, not strategic. True creativity often begins here.

It’s easy to mistake this for mastery.

What it reveals is a kind of blindness. Not ignorance in the dismissive sense but a sacred unawareness. We’re gifted a runway we don’t realize we’re on. There’s no awareness of risk because the crash hasn’t happened yet. The unconscious competence phase hides the friction. It hums beneath the surface until something—an injury, a rupture, a moment of failure—brings us face-to-face with the limitations of momentum.

Unconscious competence shows us that just because something feels natural doesn’t mean it’s sustainable. Because something’s breaking doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

To learn and grow, the glow of unconscious competence must fade. Then, on the path to learn from growth, Cameron introduces us to conscious incompetence. 

This painful, yet necessary phase makes you realize how unprepared you are, how many things are hurting your ego, and damaging your relationships. You can’t go back to fix anything, but going forward feels terrifying. This is natural. In astrology, it’s referred to as Saturn's Return. Back on earth, it’s the perfect definition of a midlife crisis—collapsed expectations. We want a salve, a quick fix like a divorce, or a shiny red sports car. What we need is to listen.

You don’t need to abandon what came instinctively. But you do need to trace it back. Understand what was real in you and what only worked in the short term. Not everything intuitive is true. And not everything painful is wrong.

The struggle in the conscious incompetence phase is often brutal. Disorienting. You have to go through it to get to the truth, the beauty, the wisdom. Cameron calls the reward conscious competence. Where you finally know what you know. A phoenix rising from the ashes.

It’s the beginning of understanding what more you can see.

* Julia Cameron is an American teacher, author, artist, poet, playwright, novelist, filmmaker, composer, and journalist.