Do you have 10 years of experience, or 1 year of experience 10 times?
It’s a question worth considering.
If you stay in the same field for many years, but are basically just going through the motions, you’re not really gaining experience. You’re experiencing repetition.
The difference, to my mind, comes down to challenging your beliefs on a regular basis.
Of course, if something isn’t working, you’ll likely do it differently.
But what if something is working? Do you over-formalize your way of arriving there? If so, you miss out on the possibility that it could work much better, done another way.
Not to suggest that all repetition is bad.
I don’t know what the appropriate number of repetitions of any given process is. The tipping point between learning a thing and becoming complacent.
I think it’s worth carving out at least a part of your working experience to experiment with new approaches, new tools, new mindsets.
It’s not just a good way to promote your growth. It also helps to keep things interesting, which, I believe, is the key to long-term success.
What’s something you do—that works fine—that you could try doing differently next time?
Anti-repetitiously,
James
One Creative Moment is a daily email for founders, owners, and creators. You'll get insights, irreverence, and inspiration to help you build a better business & live a more creative life.
One of the things missing from much of the “get AI to do everything for you” messaging is this fact: writing isn’t just a product, it’s a process. Yes, it’s nice to have “content.” But thinking that having it is the only outcome that matters is shallow and short-sighted. One of the things that has astounded me since I started writing daily(ish) emails back in November 2022 is how much it has changed me. It has vastly improved my ability to think—and to put those thoughts into clear, concise...
If you want to achieve more, do less. That is to say, build time into your day, your week, your year for quiet. In our house, following lunch, there is a period of mandated quiet time. It gives everyone a chance to do something they’d otherwise not do: nothing. It could be napping, reading, working on art, or even listening to something specific on headphones—as long as it’s quiet and done alone. For Kayte and I, it’s almost always napping, lol. During that time, we can recharge. We can...
“…We are ‘persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.’” This is Kate Raworth quoting Economist Tim Jackson in her book Doughnut Economics while discussing the power of aspiration in influencing human behaviour. Reading this, I realized that seeing (or at least feeling) this is what kept me from marketing for so long. (And what keeps me from engaging in much of its mainstream still.) I thought of it only as a...