Experience can be the best teacher, but there are pros and cons to our experiences. A disadvantage of experience comes when you no longer look ahead to continue learning. You might become confident with your experience and you then fail to sustain a fresh and objective perspective for what lies ahead of you. You become comfortable enough to imagine that you have it all figured out.

Never lose your edge to continue learning. It’s much harder to stay at the top of your game as a valued contributor than it is to get there. Disruptions to prior experiences will occur, the conditions and the people around you will change. Without a new and refreshed perspective to continue learning, we will fall back.

Seek each day to do something for the very first time, to continually add to your experiences. Seek through these first-time experiences to know of the problems and the ever-changing conditions before they would ever occur by looking for them. Be as curious and engaged to learn from your experiences as you were on your very first day. Avoid the comforting routine of hoping to repeat the same set of experiences over and over.

“Fire yourself on a Friday night and come in on Monday morning as if a search firm put you there as a turn-around leader. Can you be objective and make the bold changes?” — Andrea Jung —

MITM