Men (and women) generally peak physically and mentally somewhere between 25 and 35 years of age. After that everything from eyesight, muscle mass, flexibility and mental ability tend to slowly decline. So does that mean that anyone over the age of 35 should be cast aside since they are past some generalized peak performance measure? Hell no!
My rant comes from a conversation about training and how it was supposedly better to go with a younger trainer than with someone who is older with outdated skills. I still haven’t decided if that was directed towards me – someone who is a bit older – or just older people in general. Either way, it caused those two still functional grey cells in my head to start thinking and ya know what, it doesn’t work that way.
Saying that someone, anyone, is out of date because of their age dismisses most of what age brings to the table with one big stereotyping statement. Certainly there are those who are out of date because they have stopped learning. But what about the professionals who continue to learn and improve their skills their entire life? What value do we assign to someone who has seen and experienced the evolution of techniques, practices and technology?
While I’m specifically speaking about one thing, the principle of experience applies across all physical or mental skills. When we learn something new, we learn from someone who already has that knowledge or skill. It is generally someone a bit older who has experience in that area. And they learned it from someone else in the same way.
Passing on what we know used to be a lot more common than it is today. It is still prevalent in the trades where apprentices work with masters, learning one step, one skill at a time until they become full-fledged tradesmen. Hopefully they too will someday pass along what they learned from their master, and from their own experience, to the next generation. By doing this each successive tradesman becomes better than they were in the past.
The whole premise of this is those in the profession never stop learning. Each time they utilize their skill, they have the opportunity to figure out how to do it better than it was taught to them. They learn from their own experience as well as tapping into the experience of others. Ongoing education and collaboration is key since the experience of a community will progress faster than the experience of just one person.
We tend to dismiss the idea of experience quickly since experience seems to equate to age, and age of course is bad. Tech companies are notorious for this. They’d rather bring in someone fresh out of college with all the latest skills than invest in their current employees. The decision of course is economic since employees who have been with a company longer are higher up in the pay scale than those who would come in off the street. You also have to invest in on-going education for your employees, another cost. When you replace the more experienced you also lose the institutional knowledge of what has been done before.
What does experience do for us? It gives us points of reference for things we are doing now. When we do a task, any task, we search our memory for how we’ve done it before. The more times we’ve done it, the more variations we’ve seen, the better our ability to perform that task or improvise a different way of approaching it. Knowing what has previously worked, as well as what has failed, gives insight to what may work the next time. A favorite quote to add some perspective: “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” – Edmund Burke
There is an old warrior proverb that says: ‘Beware the old man in a profession where men die young.’ Age is only a number that comes from surviving another birthday. Wisdom drawn from experience is the key to expertise. Dismissing what someone past their “prime” has to offer because you believe they are no longer relevant is a quick and easy way to make yourself feel good, right up until the old guy hands you your ass on a platter because he knows how to play the game a whole lot better than you thought he did.
Bob
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