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Blog 2 of 4: The Expert’s Trap

Why Your Best Spreadsheet Skills Are Your Biggest Hurdle

Post Summary: This post explores a painful paradox: your mastery of spreadsheets is often the biggest barrier to adopting a database mindset. We’ll examine how “best practices” actually reinforce the spreadsheet silo instead of building a bridge. Then, we’ll dive into the psychological and political reasons for resistance, from the “sunk cost fallacy” and threats to “professional identity” to the rational defense of “spreadsheet fiefdoms” and informal organizational power.

What’s Next: Now that we understand the deep psychological and professional traps, the next post will tackle the “Relational Leap” itself — deconstructing the alien, “schema-first” world of databases and why it feels so fundamentally counterintuitive.

The Paradox of Mastery

In our last post, we explored the “Spreadsheet Habitus” — our term for the deep, psychological comfort of the “non-judgmental grid” and how it trains our brains to think in a specific, spatial-visual way.

Now we come to the great paradox: Who resists the move to a structured database the most? It’s not the novices. It’s the power users.

It seems counterintuitive. You’d assume that someone who has mastered complex…