If you needed a heart transplant, you probably wouldn’t want
a physician on his first day out of fellowship. You would want someone with
experience. If you were having a custom home built, you wouldn’t choose a
builder beginning his first house. We all value experts with experience. But
the problem with experience, at least how we generally measure it, is that we
look at it quantitatively rather than qualitatively.
There’s a big difference between someone with 20 years of
experience and someone else who essentially has one year of experience 20
times. The world is full of “experts” who have their experience on repeat, not
learning or growing or improving, just replaying similar circumstances and
using cookie-cutter solutions over and over.
We must each be careful to not fall into the same trap. Just
because we have done something for a long time does not ensure we are improving
in that craft. Development and mastery don’t simply come with age. We don’t
grow by default simply by the passing of days on a calendar.
You must intentionally force yourself to be challenged and
stretched. To be placed in uncomfortable situations in which the solutions are
hidden or foreign. To be exposed to new stimuli and novel problems. This is how
you grow in experience over time and end up with experience in your years practicing
a given craft or discipline, and not just many years of the same general
experience.
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