When experience becomes a liability….
Reflect on this statement: “If you are contesting constructive feedback about how you can do a better job, you are really not as experienced as you have spent years at your job!”
Many so called professionals have trouble taking feedback gracefully. In my experience, I have found that it is usually the ones that are good at what they do that have little trouble taking feedback… even if it were passed on critically to them! True professionals are on the constant quest for self-development!
Experience is the amount of actual work that you have done… the extent to which you have applied yourself… the learnings that you have acquired and the substantive knowledge that you have gained that can directly be felt based on the positive impact that you can create… the value that you are able to add!
Experience translates to how capable you are in handling complex situations given the breadth and depth of your know-how within your field of work… It makes you appreciate your field of work more… your respect for the other contributors, experts and practitioners goes up…. Your understanding of why things cannot be done is higher…. Your patience and responsibility towards the new entrants into the field is greater…. You become more humble and consequently, more accepting of how else it could be done…. How you can be even better at what you do!
The rest of them confuse their years of being employed with experience….
They spend years on out, at their desks… holding their tools… doing barely enough to get by…. The one thing that they do build up is an ego… of how many years of experience they have! Dare tell them how they could do things better… and they will spit out venom in quick defense… to hide behind the shield of a ‘number’, that’s nothing more than a resultant of when they managed to take birth….
Experience in such cases is soggy baggage that they carry boastfully on their heads that only covers their vision from the one thing that it was actually meant to give them… i.e., submission unto the trade in gratitude for owning them… feeding them… sustaining them!
An experienced tree feller knows precisely where to strike his axe on the tree trunk to cut it in the least amount of time, every time! What speak of him, who has been beating the tree up with a baton across its entire length for years and years only to complain that the tree did not budge!!!
If tenures meant experience, every octogenarian would be the undisputed authority of how life need to be lead! Pity…. there are more that pass away in ignorance than may be counted on a nine digit number line!!!
