How is dashboard building like gold panning?

Trick question. Dashboard building is not like gold panning.
Gold panning requires a geologist or prospector with a certain skill set, and dashboards should only be designed by data analysts with formal training.
Building a dashboard means giving your audience a block of information. They’ll need to do the work to extract the useful pieces from it.
You don’t want to give your audience a dense block of information. Instead, you need to massage your data to ensure your extracting the real gold — actionable insight!