“When people have spent a lifetime in an industry they tend to think that they have acquired 30 years of experience when in fact they probably acquired the first three years 10 times over.”
Time Served
Hargadon said this in a 2003 interview about where innovation comes from: new ideas are mostly old ideas carried in from another field, so people stay sharp by moving into unfamiliar territory. This line is about what happens when you stop moving.
“The more comfortable we are in a particular setting the less we need to think about what we’re doing,” he says, and a job held for decades is as comfortable as work gets. The cure is to keep stepping somewhere you don’t yet know the rules, a “discomfort zone” that forces you to borrow from elsewhere.
Which is why “20 years of experience,” waved around like a credential, should make you suspicious rather than impressed. It is a fact about the calendar, not about the person. Plenty of those years can be the first one run back again and again, and the people quickest to flash the number are often the ones who quietly stopped learning around year three. The honest question is what they did in year nineteen that they couldn’t have done in year four.