My copilot watched the dust cloud behind us and called out its progress so I could anticipate its arrival.
On my first attempt at a night dust landing, I lost visibility and sense of the helicopter’s orientation. I touched down tilted to the left, with the left skid hitting first. That’s dangerous. It creates a risk of dynamic rollover, where the helicopter pivots around the skid and can roll beyond the point of recovery.
When landing in a dusty environment, the helicopter’s rotor wash lifts dust from the ground. As the helicopter slows and descends, that cloud catches up with it and reduces visibility. This is called brownout.
The timing of the dust cloud reaching the cockpit depends on your approach angle and speed, along with the environmental conditions. It can reach you just above the ground, leaving you to finish the landing with severely reduced visibility. During the day, you may still be able to make out your usual visual references through the dust and use them to complete the landing. At night, the dust completely obscures the view through your night vision goggles, leaving them useless in that moment.
The goggles are useful, but they have limits. You don’t use them to look at everything. To read the cockpit instruments, for example, you look underneath them with your naked eyes.
During these dust landings, you have to look beneath the goggles and down out the door toward a ground reference you can still see. You’re changing both where you look and how you look while continuing to fly the helicopter.
I understood the procedure. Through repeated landings, I became better at recognizing when to shift my view and make that transition while controlling the helicopter. The explanation told me what to do. Experience helped me recognize the moment and coordinate my response.
That is what interests me: how experience deepens what we know. What develops through practice that an explanation alone cannot give us?
In those landings, it was more than remembering the steps. It was becoming better at seeing what was happening and responding while it happened.
What is knowledge?
Merriam-Webster defines knowledge as “information, understanding, or skill that you get from experience or education.” (Merriam-Webster)
That definition covers a lot. You can gain knowledge from a lecture, a book, a conversation, or years spent working at something. But it leaves open the difference between understanding an explanation and developing the knowledge of someone who has practiced for years.
That is the difference I’m interested in.
Consider the familiar idea that mastery takes 10,000 hours. There is no universal number of hours that guarantees mastery, but the idea raises a useful question: what do those hours supply? What develops through doing something repeatedly, making adjustments, and working to improve that you couldn’t get from even a very good explanation?
There is also the question of how much of what we learn we can explain. We may be able to describe a procedure without being able to put every part of performing it into words.
Think of riding a bike. You make adjustments that keep you upright, but describing exactly how you make them is another matter. Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian-British chemist and philosopher, described this as tacit knowing: knowledge you use but cannot fully put into words.
But a response becoming familiar or instinctive doesn’t guarantee that it’s right. That leaves the question of how experience develops useful knowledge, and how we distinguish a sound lesson from a mistaken one.
What practice adds
An explanation can tell you what to pay attention to. Practice gives you opportunities to recognize it as it happens, respond, and see what follows.
With the dust landings, I knew I would need to shift my view. But the dust didn’t reach the cockpit at exactly the same point on every approach. I had to recognize the timing under the conditions of that landing and coordinate the transition while controlling the helicopter.
Across repeated attempts, I became better at doing that. The procedure hadn’t changed. My ability to recognize and respond to the situation had.
That gives us one way to think about what the hours of practice supply. Each attempt offers information: what you noticed, what you missed, what you did, and what happened afterward. You have an opportunity to compare the result with what you intended and adjust the next attempt.
Some learning happens without a deliberate review. Through repeated experience, you may pick up patterns without consciously identifying them. Researchers examine this kind of process as implicit learning.
Implicit learning and tacit knowledge are related, but they answer different questions. Implicit learning concerns how you learn. Tacit knowledge concerns what you know but cannot fully explain. Knowledge developed through intentional practice can also have a tacit element.
Other learning is deliberate. You identify something that needs work, focus on it, and use feedback to make adjustments. Instead of repeating the entire activity and hoping to improve, you work on a particular difficulty.
That matters when we talk about hours. Time spent repeating an activity and time spent working to improve it can contain very different kinds of experience.
An after-action review makes that examination explicit. You plan a mission, carry it out, then compare what happened with what you intended. What went right? Where did the result differ from the plan? What should change next time?
The important part is examining why. An outcome tells you what happened, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what caused it. Your decision may have contributed to success. So may the conditions, another person’s actions, or factors you didn’t notice.
This is part of what it means for knowledge to deepen. You become better at performing the task, but you also develop a better understanding of the circumstances that affect it. That gives you more to work with when the next situation is different.
What success can hide
Consider a real estate developer whose projects have all taken place in a favorable market. Rents are rising, demand is high, and the projects are making money.
Over time, the developer gets better at working through approvals, coordinating consultants, managing schedules, and strengthening relationships. Those are real gains in knowledge and skill. What remains less clear is how much those gains explain the financial success, and how much the market contributed.
Repeated success may not make that distinction any clearer. If the same approach keeps working under similar conditions, each successful project can appear to confirm that the approach is sound.
Then conditions change. Demand decreases, new supply gets overbuilt, and financing becomes more expensive. Decisions that previously produced a profit may no longer do so.
That doesn’t mean the developer learned nothing. The operational knowledge may still be valuable. But the experience may have supported a narrower lesson than the developer assumed: this approach worked under those conditions.
Even deliberate reflection can miss that distinction. You can carefully review a successful project and give your decisions too much credit. The review may strengthen your original explanation unless you consider what else contributed to the result.
This complicates the idea that experience automatically produces deeper knowledge. You can become more skilled at an activity while remaining mistaken about why it succeeds.
What matters is whether experience deepens your understanding of what produced the result, so you can judge what to carry forward and what to reconsider when conditions change.
What we come to understand
I began exploring this topic with the idea that experience is the deepest form of knowledge. But calling it deeper doesn’t explain what has changed. What do we understand now that we didn’t understand before?
An explanation gives us a starting point. Experience supplies the material for a bridge to deeper understanding. We build it by noticing patterns, making adjustments, examining results, and revising what we thought we knew.
Perhaps what develops is a better understanding of how our actions and the conditions in which we act work together to produce a result. We become better at distinguishing what we influenced from what happened around us, and recognizing why an approach worked instead of simply remembering that it did.
That understanding changes what we can carry forward. “This worked before” gives us a response to repeat. Understanding why it worked, and what conditions it depended on, gives us a basis for adapting it.
That may be part of what mastery involves: developing a reliable ability to act while becoming more discerning about when a familiar response fits.
A new situation may look familiar. Experience can help us recognize what carries over, what needs adjusting, and what we still need to understand.
But familiarity can also lead us to settle on an explanation too quickly. Perhaps deeper knowledge includes recognizing when past experience helps explain what’s happening, and when it’s keeping us from seeing something new.
Related Essays
The Sun Room: Being held responsible for an outcome without control over the conditions, and the belief about effort I carried forward from it.
The Card Catalog: A childhood lesson that safety came from visible output, and how it kept shaping my adult life long after the conditions changed.