Experience & Relevance

Why do I crave relevance? - Isfandiyar Shaheen - Medium

I wanted to share some thoughts today with respect to Experience and Relevance that was, in part, inspired by this quote from Leo Tolstoy

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

That resonated with me and I thought it would resonate with a lot of you as well right now.

Pretty much everyone is talking about what changes the coronavirus will being to our societies and businesses. There’s a lot of discussion with respect to change and doing things differently; so that got me thinking about the ideas of experience and relevance.

Humans make thousands of decisions every day; but, our brains don’t give each decision one of those decisions equal attention, our brains take all kinds of mental shortcuts.

These shortcuts are known as “biases.” They’re not necessarily good nor bad; they just are.

When I was younger and closer to the start of my career, I always struggled with having “experience” thrown at me as a way to justify a position, and it always frustrated me.

It frustrated me because no matter how much I did, no matter how many years I have under my belt, I would never be able to close the experience gap between me and someone who started 10 years earlier let’s say ... no one can make up time.

Another part of me also always wanted to say “and how does that help here and now”.

Success in not just about having experience in a field.

Success is about how relevant your idea, approach, thinking or solution is to the problem, how well does it connect with the matter at hand?

Bringing that back around to my quote ... how are you thinking about changing yourself?

Are you allowing cognitive biases like the expedience bias, confirmation bias and the self-serving bias drive your decisions?

Are you making the same decisions based on the past, and what you knew, because it brings you comfort and safety, because you think there’s more certainty there?

I really challenge you to step out of your comfort zone, to challenge what you’re thinking, what your boss thinking , the way your HR department is hiring, the solutions you are accepting from your vendors and suppliers ... everything.

Ask yourself, is what we are doing relevant to our challenges today? But more importantly, is what you are doing going to be relevant tomorrow, or are you just trying to recreate where you used to be.

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