I used to talk a lot about “change” inside my company. We need to change this process. Change how we think. Change how we work. I eventually realized that change is a terrible sales pitch. It sounds like work. Worse, it sounds like an accusation: what you’re doing today is wrong.
So I’ve started replacing “change” with a much better word: learning. Instead of asking, “What do we need to change?” ask, “What have we learned recently?” Same destination. Completely different psychology.
At 62, this has changed how I think about experience. For most of my career, experience meant knowing more. You collected information like frequent-flyer miles. Thirty years in an industry meant thirty years of patterns and mistakes you can’t Google.
Then AI showed up. Now a 25-year-old can access more democratized information before breakfast than I’ve accumulated. So the value of experience has shifted. Experience is knowing what matters and what to ignore.
But experience has a bug: lessons become rules. Rules become assumptions. And assumptions turn into the stuff you do on autopilot, the stuff you stopped questioning years ago. Example is reserves of $0.30 per square foot in a pro forma because they’ve used it a thousand times. But when did we last ask whether $0.30 is actually right?
The antidote is curiosity. My sensei is constantly bringing something new into our training. One week it might be fighting techniques from Venezuelan prisons. Another, elements of Sambo or military techniques. He’ll keep what works and discard what doesn’t. It doesn’t protect the old playbook. It gives you a better filter for the new one.
The advantage is having enough experience to recognize what’s useful, enough humility to discard what isn’t, and enough curiosity to keep looking. Expertise itself can become the thing that stops you from learning.
Expertise shouldn’t be the end of learning. It should make you better at it.
What are you learning?