Experience is misleading.

Lots of people talk about the value and benefit of experience. It sounds like an easy thing to quantify – just look at the number of years they have experienced. But there is a fundamental difference between 10 years of experience, and 1 year of experience, repeated nine times.

Experience can be a big benefit if you get it right. Here are some thoughts to consider.

On the one hand, the first time we do anything is going to suck. There is just so much to learn and apply that we are bound to make lots of errors. Experience improves speed, effectiveness, and efficiency to consistently good outcomes.

Each repeat gets better because experience provides incremental benefits to the skills and situational awareness. We fine-tune our activities and begin to develop nuanced understanding of complex processes within a few completions.

On the other hand, the efficiencies gained are relatively short lived in constantly changing times. Merely being experienced or good at highly repetitious activities will not stave off advancements in technology.

For hundreds of years, experience was critical for those who manually laid out the individual letters that made up the words, sentences and paragraphs of a printed newspaper. But it became obsolete within the span of a couple decades by software that can be used at absolutely zero cost. AI is currently threatening to do this to dozens of niche industries. 

The problem is that most see experience as a number of repetition – days, months, years at a job. They assume 10 years experience is at least 10 times better than 1 year. 

Sometimes it is. Mostly it is not.

The real super power goes to those who maximize their experience. They constantly look for ways to improve; expose themselves to diverse backgrounds; and retain fluid ideas about processes! Experience like this hones the skill of navigating through chaos, ambiguity, and challenging times while assembling nuances into some sense of order. 

The learning curve is long, steep, and unpredictable; often leaving emotional and financial scars.

Businesses of all types would benefit from those with super-charged experience. But that will require some unique experience itself!