Knowing the Edges of Your Expertise
Garage sale season burst wide open in our neighbourhood a few weeks ago, arriving alongside fully blooming trees, overflowing gardens, and the unmistakable sense that people had emerged from winter ready to reconnect.
There was a time when garage sales gave me FOMO. I was convinced there might be some hidden treasure waiting a few streets over: the perfect side table, a vintage record, a first edition book that somehow ended up in the wrong hands. These days, garage sales trigger a different kind of FOMO. As I walk past tables piled high with things people no longer need, I find myself wondering how many items in my own home are ready to be enjoyed by others.
I ended up stopping at one sale around the corner with my mom, who is both an avid reader and a firm believer in neighbourly conversations. We wandered over to a table covered in books where a young teenager greeted us and asked whether he could help.
My mom looked over the assortment of 1980s and 1990s gardening books, cookbooks, and classic fiction and asked the teen if he had read any of them.
"No," he said.
There was no hesitation in his answer and no attempt to pretend otherwise. Then he picked up one of the books, looked at the cover, and said, "This one looks pretty good."
He proceeded to point out the books that looked well cared for, the ones with interesting covers, and a few that appeared to have been read often enough to be worth a second look.
My mom and I were completely charmed by the interaction. Not because he knew the books, but because he didn't.
In the sales research I have been reading of late, there is a recurring finding that initially felt counterintuitive to me: acknowledging limitations can increase trust. Most of us assume credibility is built by demonstrating expertise, confidence, and certainty. Yet standing at a folding table covered in secondhand books, I watched the opposite happen.
The teenager made no attempt to be an authority on something he clearly knew nothing about. He simply answered the question that had been asked. In doing so, he made everything else he said feel more believable.
What struck me was that his honesty created room for trust. Once we knew where his knowledge ended, we had a much clearer sense of where it began.
This is not an argument for announcing your flaws to everyone you meet. Nor is it a case for diminishing your expertise. If anything, it is the opposite. There is something powerful about knowing the edges of what you can genuinely offer.
The people I trust most are rarely the ones claiming certainty about everything. They are the people who can clearly distinguish between what they know, what they suspect, and what they have yet to learn.
A teenager at a garage sale probably wasn't trying to teach anyone a lesson about trust. Yet there we were, standing in front of a table of old books, feeling far more inclined to listen because he had started with a simple and honest answer:
“No, I haven't read any of them.”