You don't get experience without pausing for reflection

One my favorite professional-ish quotes (source is hazy) is
"There's a huge difference between 20 years experience and 1 years experience 20 times."
I interpret that as a few different things: the need to constantly grow, to learn new things, develop professionally etc. etc. - but for the past couple of weeks, in brief pauses while being on vacation, I've been thinking about when and how that actually happens.

We're in execution mode most of the time. We're doing things either for work or in our personal lives and we often measure how well we're doing by the sheer number of things we do. We are programmed to favor things that seem urgent over things that are important.

Learning, however, is most effective in the pauses - i.e. not when you're doing but when you have a chance to step back and review what you actually did. If we're not regularly reviewing we're not likely to improve, and even more importantly less likely to learn from our experience.

I'm trying a couple of things over the next weeks to help me formalize finding time for this a bit more during work and in life. Let's see how it goes. :-)

Comments

Gayatri said…
I will be interested in finding out the outcome of your experiment
salgar said…
Thanks for reading. :)
I'll try to blog about how it goes.

Popular posts from this blog

The "Rescue Me" minisodes

A short love letter to ~8 years on Google Search - 8 things I’m grateful for.

Avengers Endgame: how trivial passions can nudge a career