PLGRM

The older I get, the more I wonder why anyone let me be in charge of anything. I’m grateful – let me be abundantly clear – because the gift of being able to stretch my wings and learn was invaluable to who I am today. It is also invaluable for anyone at the start of their careers.

But what I wish I had learned then as opposed to now is the truth that ideas are different from experience.

When I was a young adult, I had a lot of good ideas. I blogged about those ideas. I tweeted about those ideas. I even wrote a book about those ideas. And, I’m pleased to say, a lot of my ideas were good ones and they were (objectively) correct.

But as I stand at the chronological apex of my life, I have come to see how much I value experience over ideas. Not merely in others, but in myself.

I find I’m less inclined to hypothesize. I’m not all that interested in running experiments. I still do them; they are valuable and a good practice, to boot. But what I seem to trust more than anything is the sense in my gut that “I’ve been here before. I know what to do here.”

If anything, I now see that, as a young adult, when I wasn’t being taken as seriously as I thought I should be taken (that’s a BIG caveat, imo) it’s likely not because the things I was saying were wrong. It was probably more that those around me were less interested in a persuasive argument than the story of how someone got those battle scars and what they learned form them.