There is a peculiar danger that comes with experience. We begin to think we’ve seen it before.
Spend enough years in business and you’ve watched trends come and go. Work with enough people and you begin recognizing patterns. Study something long enough and you develop opinions about how it works. Do anything for several decades and eventually somebody starts calling you experienced.
That’s usually considered an advantage. It should be. But experience can also become a trap if everything new gets filtered through what we already think we know.
I’ve come to believe that one of the best things experience can give us isn’t greater certainty. It’s greater curiosity.
I’ve seen this movie before. Or have I?
I watched information technology explode during the 1980s. Then I lived through the internet revolution and the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Those periods included enormous excitement, extraordinary innovation, ridiculous predictions, spectacular successes, and equally spectacular failures. They changed business anyway.
Having lived through those transformations affects the way I look at artificial intelligence today. My reaction isn’t, “I’ve seen this before, so I know exactly where it’s going.” It’s almost the opposite. I’ve seen enough technological change to recognize that something significant may be happening — and enough to know that nobody can predict exactly where it leads.
That’s one reason I’ve chosen to go all in on learning AI. Not because I know what it will become. Because I don’t. I want to remain curious enough to find out.
Reading something familiar with expectation
I’ve experienced something similar with Scripture. There are passages in the Bible I’ve read many times, and you might think familiarity would eventually exhaust them.
Instead, I can read a familiar passage and suddenly notice something I hadn’t seen before. A word. A connection. A meaning that speaks differently because I’m different from the person who read that passage ten or twenty years ago.
As a Christian, I believe Scripture is the living Word of God, so I’ve learned to approach it expectantly. Not, “I already know what this says,” but, “What am I going to see this time?”
There is an important difference between familiarity and exhaustion. Something can be deeply familiar and still have more to teach us.
No two sunrises are the same
Photography has taught me the same lesson in a completely different way.
I’ve photographed a lot of sunrises and sunsets. The sun has come up before. I know approximately where it’s going to appear, and I understand something about light and clouds and reflections. So why keep going back?
Because I’ve never seen today’s sunrise. Every one is different. The clouds are different, the atmosphere is different, the water is different, the color is different. Sometimes the spectacular moment happens where I expect it. Sometimes it happens behind me. Sometimes nothing dramatic happens at all, and I notice something quieter that I would have missed if I’d arrived expecting yesterday’s photograph.
The experience I’ve accumulated as a photographer shouldn’t tell me what I’m going to see. It should help me see more.
Never profile people
And then there are people. If experience tempts us toward certainty anywhere, it may be here.
We meet someone and begin assembling a profile. Age, appearance, job, education, accent, background, a few minutes of conversation. And before long we think we know who we’re dealing with.
I’ve learned not to do that — or at least to catch myself when I do. People continually surprise me. Someone I expected little from has taught me something important. Someone whose life looked completely different from mine has become fascinating once I listened. People I’ve underestimated have exceeded every expectation. And occasionally, people I’ve been impressed by initially have taught me to be a little more careful about first impressions.
You simply don’t know. That’s what makes people interesting.
Experience should open us up
Perhaps when we’re young, certainty is useful. We need enough confidence to make decisions, take risks, build careers, and move forward without understanding everything.
But experience ought to teach us something about the limits of certainty. We’ve been wrong before. We’ve changed our minds. We’ve watched impossible things happen and watched supposedly inevitable things never happen at all. We’ve met people who didn’t fit our assumptions. We’ve returned to familiar places and discovered something new. We’ve read familiar words and understood them differently.
So these days I don’t want experience to make my world smaller by convincing me that I already understand it. I want it to make my world larger. I want to approach technology wondering what becomes possible. Scripture wondering what God may show me. A sunrise wondering what the sky will do today. And another person wondering what I might discover if I don’t decide who they are before they have the chance to show me.
Maybe that’s one of the privileges of experience. Eventually we’ve lived long enough to know how often we’ve been surprised. And that should be reason enough to remain expectant.