The Experience Trap

For many people, 20 years of experience is one year of experience repeated 20 times. - Andy Hargadon

When we seek out an experienced professional, perhaps a doctor to treat us or a mechanic to fix our car, it’s not really experience we seek. It’s skill we’re looking for. Experience just happens to be a convenient proxy we use to judge skill. And for the most part, it works for simple skills, but it’s an imperfect and often misleading signal for complex activities.

It’s an easy idea to prove. Most of us have been driving a car for 20 or 30 years. Yet, none of us are anywhere closer today than we were decades ago to driving professionally in Formula 1, despite all the hours we’ve put in behind the wheel. Sure, we improved for a couple years after getting our license. But then we got to “good enough,” hit a plateau, and have been going through the motions ever since. Experience doesn’t count when you just show up.

A lot of experience is mindless repetition. There’s no detailed training regimen. No skill is specifically targeted. Activity is done for activity’s sake, not to improve a specific attribute. There’s no feedback. It’s nearly impossible to evaluate our own performance. One reason is psychological. Our ego overestimates our ability and conveniently ignores the flaws that are obvious to an unbiased observer. We see what we want to see, which makes us look better than we really are. The other reason is physical. We physically can’t observe everything that’s going on with us, so we miss mistakes. We can’t fix what we don’t see. When we don’t get feedback on what we’re doing wrong, and when there’s no coach to help correct our mistakes, improvement is constrained.

The solution to mindless repetition is deliberate practice, an idea pioneered by K. Anders Ericsson. If you want to improve, it’s the guide you need. Deliberate practice specifically addresses your weaknesses. It’s fun to practice what you’re good at. It’s hard and unnatural to practice the things you’re bad at. Deliberate practice also slows down the skill so you can expose and correct all the little mistakes that are typically neglected. That can become tedious and mentally exhausting, which is why it’s rarely done.  

Deliberate practice requires immediate and specific feedback. Most feedback lacks one or both of these components. Delayed feedback doesn’t improve your skill because you’re not able to immediately correct and replace bad habits. It’s like finding out a month later that you’ve been over-rotating your wrists on your golf swing. You need to know that immediately after you do it, so you can start rehearsing the proper mechanics on the next swing. Otherwise, you’re just encoding poor technique, which will take even more time to correct than not having any technique at all. The other feedback issue is vague, nonspecific instruction. You need to know exactly what’s going wrong in order to fix it. Vague encouragements like “work harder” do nothing but cause frustration.  

There’s lots of people that work hard and long, but don’t get better. Ericsson calls this, “naïve practice.” It’s what most of us do when we practice. But it’s not about more effort and more time. It’s about applying the right effort. Hard work is necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

Be careful with experience. It’s a poor reflection of skill. Instead of thinking in terms of experience or time, evaluate in terms of deliberate practice. The more an activity is done with deliberate practice, the better the skill.