The Innocence of Age

I wonder if experience comes with age, or with certain exposure to a certain subject. Let me give you an example: you are 60 years old, and you worked all your life in the same office doing the same job, let's say handling the contracts of your division. People around you will call you very experienced at what you do. Then a new 32 year old employee arrives at your office, and she has worked in at least five different countries handing very different types of contracts in very different types of working environments.

Who is more experienced? You, who had done the same type of contract deals for the last 40 years or her, who has been exposed to a bigger pot of contracts?

In many places, you will be the guru of contracts, since you’ve done your work for 40 years! The 32 year old employee will be work in progress, certainly not someone with your level of “experience” because she is only 32 right?

Well, I think is wrong. To me, she is probably as experienced as you are, because while you sat for the last 40 years doing the same job, she rapidly acquired a very large amount of experienced in a very short period of time, that it took you decades to acquire. So, though my example is quite radical, it is very possible that a younger person is a lot more experienced than an older person doing the same type of job. Now, try to demonstrate that.

I think bosses love the age technique to prevent you from moving forward too fast. In my own experience, every time I felt ready to tackle the next challenge, I was told I was too young. It seems I was always too young. Even when my first grey hair appeared, still I was a toddler to my boss. I was anxious to learn to walk, but he insisted I kept crawling.

I was too young all my life at work… until I resigned from my job. Then, out of the blue, miraculously, I grew up. The first question I was asked was: “how old are you?” and my interviewer made no effort to hide his horror. I was not too young anymore. Now I was suddenly too old to start a new career. Was I mad?, how could I start all over again at my age (despite being only in my early 30s).

So this is the innocence of age. You are too young to move forward, too young to progress, too young to ask for a pay raise, too young to be promoted, too young to handle more responsibility. But dish it all, start again from scratch, and out of the blue, you are too old. People then think you are too old to start again. You go from toddler to be elder in a few seconds. And you probably wonder how it all happened so fast.

So if you are stuck in the “age and experience” dilemma let me share with you the following:

1. You can be 17 going on 70. Our world is so interactive and rich that you can live so many more experiences so much faster than your grandparents ever did. Just sharpen your senses and be willing to experience the “experience”.

2. You are never too young to succeed. If age is holding you back, probably it is a good time to go on your own. Try the entrepreneur route. You will be able to travel at your own pace, nobody to tell you that you are still a toddler, when you know well that you already run in the Olympics!

3. You are never too old to start all over again. You actually never start from scratch, life is such a combination of lessons learnt that when you “start all over again” what you are doing is just choosing a new road with all the learning from the past.

4. If you are 70, don’t think that you know it all. If you are 17, don’t think either that the 70 year old one looking through his glasses right at you, didn’t go what you went through. You don’t have to experience every bump in the road, that 70 year old might be just what you need to experience life in a better way!