From the article on Zingerman’s Family of Businesses referenced in the previous entry:

There’s a concept taught in ZingTrain’s seminars concerning the mastery of a skill. When you know absolutely nothing about a skill, you are unconsciously incompetent — that is, you don’t know what you don’t know. As you learn more, you become consciously incompetent: you know what you don’t know. With training and practice you can become consciously competent, while total mastery makes you unconsciously competent, meaning that you use the skill so effortlessly that you’re not even aware you’re doing it.

Makes sense to me. Easy to apply to life. At Berkman I started off unconsciously incompetent, over a bit of time I realized how much I needed to learn about systems administration (conciously incomptent), and lately I’ve reached conscious competence — I have a fairly good idea of how to do things and know which weaknesses I still need to address. If I continue down this path I might eventually reach unconcious competence, but I’m not there yet by a ways.