Experience and REWORK

I’ve worked with many older and seasoned folks over the years on projects. Often, they had many more years of experience than me. Some of them reported to me on projects. 

One sad thing I noticed about many of these (I won’t say all, but it was a common theme), is that they liked to talk constantly about a previous project. Some were hanging on to that one project they had worked on 10 or 15 or more years ago. They wanted everything on the new project to relate directly to that old project. Usually, the conversations were about how they had done it differently on that old project and why couldn’t we do it like that on this new one? 

I don’t know your experience in this issue. But, for me, these folks were deliberately placing themselves in that “how we did it then” category. It didn’t matter that techniques had changed, methods had changed, the law had changed, or that anything else had changed. They wanted it the way it was. 


I thought of this recently in reading REWORK by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, Founders of 37signals. In their book (highly recommended for project thinking), they have a section titled “What Does 5 Years Experience Mean Anyway?”. The subtitle explains their point – “Year of irrelevance”.


It isn’t the time you’ve been employed that matters in the end. It’s what you did with that time. Many of those I mentioned above were still living in the past. Many more still are today. To be able to do good project work, you have to learn and grow. Sure, those old experiences can be valuable as lessons for work and life. But, those experiences can’t be your whole life.

If you’re stuck there, I say you should get out now. Learn about your work from a new perspective. Learn about what’s happening in other industries. How are other people and other companies changing as things change?

If you are already advancing, what keeps you moving?