The Dangers of Experience, or the “B-Side” of Being a Rookie
Experience and well-earned wisdom can be immensely valuable, but we shouldn’t exclude ourselves from the benefits of a “beginner’s mind.” Over-relying on past experience can be limiting—and even deadly.
Experience is often hailed as the mother of all wisdom and the reason why seasoned executives command six-figure salaries, but what if I told you that sometimes, experience can be our worst enemy?
This may come as a surprise. Isn’t experience — or the lack of it — the reason for the vicious cycle that keeps young people from getting a job? Aren’t would-be entrepreneurs abundantly warned, “Don’t meddle in what you’re not good at,” or “What do you know about that?”
Investment funds will often flat-out refuse to support a project or startup if the team doesn’t include someone who knows the industry or business model well.
Even science agrees: the Dunning-Kruger effect (as well-explained by James Maebe) warns that those who know the least about a topic tend to — often catastrophically — overestimate their ability to perform well in it. It basically alerts us that ignorance breeds arrogance.
Sometimes, however, our faith in experience can lead to tunnel vision and closed-mindedness about new possibilities, new information (especially if it contradicts what we hold to be true) — and new risks.
Betrayed by experience
As Laurence Gonzales argues in his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, the glorification of past experiences can be deadly.
For example, the choice between taking the stairs up or down became a matter of life or death during the 9/11 attack. Those who descended had a better chance of survival than those who went up to the top of the building. However, many who went up did so based on the experience of the first WTC attack in 1993, which occurred in the parking lot and therefore required going upstairs to survive. That precedent, far from helping in 9/11, led to the deaths of many.
During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, dozens of people died insisting on staying in their homes and not going to a shelter, arguing that they had already endured serious storms in the past.
During the many waves of the Covid-19 pandemic, people who had emerged unscathed from previous waves — and mutations — of the virus became overconfident, relaxing precautionary measures until they, too, caught the virus.
In the business world, how many conflicts in meeting rooms arise because the more experienced faction in the organization — the “founding generation,” for example — cling to a way of doing things, dismissing the ideas of new employees, especially if they’re from a younger generation?
Negligence is not exclusive to amateurs
Similarly, highly experienced mountaineers have, on several occasions, lost their lives because they over-relied on their experience and neglected safety rules. In the 1996 Mount Everest Disaster—which Jon Krakauer famously chronicled in his book Into Thin Air (you can read Robert Stribley’s review of it here)—skilled climbers ignored adverse weather conditions and pushed forward in their ascent. As a result of their self-assurance, many of them perished in the mountain’s “death zone.”
In the world of geopolitics, Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022 was based on several factors, but there’s little doubt that his prior success in annexing Crimea in 2014 led to the presumption that his new military maneuver would go just as smoothly. To date, it clearly hasn’t.
Openness + curiosity + humility
While it’s true that many ventures fail because they wander into unknown territory, many others succeed precisely because the people leading them see completely new possibilities. They have a “beginner’s mind” — constituted by openness, curiosity, and humility — that allows them to approach a problem in a mentally unfettered way:
- Airbnb wasn’t launched by seasoned hoteliers,
- Uber wasn’t conceived by transportation experts,
- Slack wasn’t created by enterprise software developers (their only prior claim was building… Flickr),
- Peloton’s founder had no previous experience in the fitness industry,
- TOMS Shoes — which donates a pair of shoes for every pair sold — wasn’t created by a footwear manufacturer.
Much like Alexander the Great, who walked up to the fabled “Gordian Knot” and, instead of figuring out how to untangle it, simply slashed it in half with his sword, a rookie mindset, if coupled with boldness, can pay off.
Mark Twain’s old adage quips that “good decisions come from experience… but experience comes from bad decisions.” The next time we encounter someone who “doesn’t know that they don’t know,” perhaps it’ll be good to give them some leeway to see how far they can go. Especially if they’re not trying to climb a killer mountain.
There is immense value in experience and well-earned wisdom — the Dunning-Kruger effect does right in warning us about the dangers of ignorance — but we shouldn’t close ourselves off to the gifts of a “beginner’s mind” and the creative audacity that often accompanies it.
