Your Experience Can Lie to You

Malcolm Gladwell is one of the authors (Outliers, Blink, The Tipping Point) and podcasters (Revisionist History) that I really pay attention to. 

He has a unique way of looking at things from all angles. 

One thing that Malcolm Gladwell said in his book, Outliers, has really stuck with me.

He is credited with saying that you need 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. 

Here’s his quote:

“To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fisher got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what’s ten years? Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.”

That doesn’t mean that 10,000 hours of practice will make you an expert, but it is a prerequisite to becoming an expert.

And this makes sense.

You can be good at what you do, but without years of practice, you won’t become an expert.

And while experience matters, unfortunately, our experience can also lie.

I’m a big believer in practice makes perfect.  But if you are practicing bad habits, they will eventually get set in stone and make you think you have perfected something.

For example:

In parenting – “Well, I raised three kids and none of them turned out to be ax murderers.” is a favorite statement by grandparents when giving out unsolicited advice to parents. 

They are saying that they’re advice should be used, because they are experts. 

And they think they are experts because you aren’t an ax murderer.  Seriously.

While they get credit for not raising ax murderers (not sure why that was the benchmark for Baby Boomers), there are 7+ billion people on planet Earth. 

The stork brought exactly zero of them. 

But you would have to assume that there aren’t 7+ billion people that could be considered experts, correct? 

That’s not to say that a lot of grandparents aren’t experts, but they can’t all be experts, simply because they were parents for a long time.

In your job – Have you ever had a boss that was in over their head?  It’s called the Peter Principle.

The Peter Principle is an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence.

Simply having several years of experience in your job doesn’t mean you are necessarily great at your job. 

You may just be good enough not to get fired.  You know, like a C+ student.

In small your business – “We have 20 years of experience” is often a marketing strategy that is much overused. 

Yes, I want my insurance agent to have a lot of experience in reading policies, but I would prefer someone that is experienced AND good. 

It is quite possible that our experience is just good enough to keep you in the same place for 20+ years.

So how do you know if your experience is lying to you?

• Are your sales the same now as they were 5 years ago?
• Are you doing the exact same tasks that should’ve been already outsourced or do you have the same exact number of employees from 5 years ago?
• Are you doing the exact same thing in all areas of your business because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”?

If the answer is yes to any of those questions, your old experience may need to be tossed for some new experiences out of your comfort zone.

10,000 hours is only good if it leads to expertise.  It’s not good if it leads to complacency.

Oh, and the ax murderer parenting comment doesn’t apply to my parents or my in-laws…much😁.