I’m Thee!”I Googled it Once” Expert

Picture this: you’re scrolling through job ads when you see something about neural networks. Neural networks? you think, I wrote an article about that once! How hard could it be? Suddenly, you feel a surge of confidence, bordering on delusion. Next thing you know, you’re imagining yourself applying for a machine learning engineer role. Forget the fact that your knowledge came from a two-hour dive down Google’s rabbit hole and a Wikipedia page. Minor details. The important thing is, you wrote about it.

Welcome to the glamorous world of content writing—where “I read about this once” mutates into “I’m basically an expert now.” It’s the “I Googled It Once” syndrome, and it hits hard. The line between “research” and “knowing stuff” becomes blurrier with every article we write. After all, we live in the age of internet-fueled hubris. Why not think we’re walking encyclopedias after a couple of afternoons buried in SEO keywords?

But let’s get real for a second. Writing about blockchain doesn’t mean you could actually code it. Researching quantum computing doesn’t make you a physicist; it just means you’ve read a few very simplified explanations. Content writers, myself included, are professional skimmers. We’re skilled at getting the gist—and that’s valuable! We’re good at synthesizing, at translating the complex into the digestible. But let’s not fool ourselves; we’re not carrying Einstein’s legacy here. (Except, maybe, for that one article we did about relativity. That one was pretty good.)

So why do we content writers think we know so much? It’s like the Dunning-Kruger effect on caffeine. After immersing ourselves in research, our brains start to think, Hey, I totally get this. But we’re not experts; we’re information tourists with no map. We don’t know all the back alleys and shortcuts; we just read the guidebook and took some decent notes.

And yet, we keep falling for it. Why? Because when you spend your days explaining things, it’s easy to believe you understand them deeply. You read a couple of whitepapers on AI and suddenly imagine yourself at a conference keynote, dazzling the crowd with your “insights.” But if someone actually handed you the keys to an AI model and asked you to “tweak the parameters,” you’d be Googling parameters before they finished the sentence.

Let’s be honest. We’re never going to stop feeling that little rush of “I got this” every time we read up on a new topic. It’s part of the job. But maybe we should also keep a little humility in our back pockets. Just because you wrote about cyber security doesn’t mean you could hack your way out of a password-protected PDF.

Here’s the secret sauce: be proud of your research skills, but leave a little room for genuine experts. They’re the ones who probably feel like they know nothing, because they’re neck-deep in all the nuances we skim over. And you know what? That’s fine. We’ve got our lane, and they’ve got theirs. We’re not frauds; we’re just very convincing information tourists. And hey, at least we’re fun at parties.