Time on the job is not experience
We applaud talent and ignore the building. But building isn't time going by: it's time spent doing and hearing feedback from those who see better.
Everyone loves the final version of people. The confident speaker, the dentist who delivers the perfect smile, the judoka who lands the throw effortlessly. Nobody sees the building. And whoever doesn't see the building concludes it is a gift: either you are, or you aren't. That conclusion has a cost. It makes you give up on becoming.
We say we value effort
Researcher Chia-Jung Tsay tested this with professional musicians. They evaluated two pianists of the same level: one presented as a natural talent, the other as someone who got there through effort and persistence. In theory, the musicians said effort matters more. In practice, they judged the "natural" more talented, more likely to succeed and more hirable (Tsay and Banaji, 2011).
With entrepreneurs, it was the same. The same business proposal, in the same audio, drew more investment interest when attributed to the "natural". And some people preferred the "natural" even when that meant ending up with someone less qualified (Tsay, 2016).
We talk about effort and applaud the gift. And when we look at ourselves, we apply the same bar: if I wasn't born with it, it isn't for me.
Time is not experience
A colleague used to say that the only difference between you and someone better is that they have been doing it longer. It's a half-truth. The word that matters is "doing".
Time on the job is not experience. A review published in the Annals of Internal Medicine gathered 62 evaluations of the relationship between physicians' years in practice and the quality of care. In 52% of them, quality declined with the years, in everything that was measured. In only 3% did it improve (Choudhry, Fletcher and Soumerai, 2005).
A dentist with a 30-year career is not good at veneers if they have never done veneers. They have 30 years of something else. Experience is time spent doing, experimenting, facing what you don't know yet. The rest is calendar.
What turns time into experience
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate in economics, and Gary Klein spent years in rival schools of thought on intuition. In an article they wrote together, they agreed on one point: an expert's intuition only deserves trust when the environment has patterns and the person has had the chance to learn them, through practice with accurate and timely feedback (Kahneman and Klein, 2009). Without feedback, the years only confirm your own way of doing things.
In dentistry, this takes a concrete form. The dentist prepares the tooth with the naked eye. The dental technician receives the scan and works with the image magnified 20 times on screen. They see what the eye can't, and can send it back: I can make the piece, but there may be a problem; do you want to go ahead?
That feedback is where experience is born. And it calls for humility, which cuts both ways. On one side, the pride that answers "I did it right, deal with it". On the other, the lack of confidence of someone who did it right and doesn't stand by it. Humility is not accepting every criticism or rejecting them all. It is looking at the work together with the other person, magnified, and deciding by what shows up.
For anyone who hires, the lesson is direct: don't confuse years on a résumé with experience. Ask what the person has done, how many times, and who evaluated it.
In judo, nobody improves a throw alone. The sensei watches the entry, corrects the foot, and you repeat. Years on the mat with no one correcting you only produce a wrong way of doing it, very well practiced.
Increased in wisdom
"And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man" (Luke 2
). The Gospel doesn't present even Jesus as a final version from the cradle. It shows growth.If not even he showed up ready-made, you don't need to. You need to do, expose yourself to feedback and grow.
