Monday, March 03, 2008

The Science Of Experience...!



I often wonder about this "work experience" concept which has puzzled me a lot since my High School Days. Our society always gives preference to a person who has done similar kind of chore than a equally talented & sharp person starting afresh. And there are plenty of reasons for such commonplace behaviour. I read somewhere that mastering the most complex human endeavors requires a minimum of 10 years' experience and when you consider examples of Chess GrandMasters, Real Estate Agents, Investment Bankers, Olympic Athletes (their practice starts right from their childhood) - you would certainly follow that notion. And to some extent I too agree to this belief (you would always take your BMW / Audi for regular maintainence to an experience mechanic than a novice right;)). Anyways, here's what my thought stream at the moment goes like:

  • Patience: The more time you spend pursuing any particular activity, the more you train your SubConscious and once your subconscious mind learns something well, it becomes a habit.
  • Patterns: Human Brain remembers experiences as illustrations than words/numbers. A series of repititive events (the work we do daily) form a pattern in our mind and thus we follow a certain set path eventually. Try observing a colleague for a week and I bet you'll find patterns in his/her way of checking emails, sipping coffee etc. That said, all we need to be efficient in certain skill is religious practice for an extended period of time.
  • Comfort Zones: Most of us (best example is me :)) like practicing what we know well rather than venturing out everyday to do stretch our skills or as my Dad says - breaking out of our Comfort Zones. In order to be real performers all we need to do is to overcome complacency & try new things. Acquisition of new skills always yields +ve results.
  • The Digital Divide: Emails are amazingly fast, convenient & best form of magnification - perhaps thats why we keep checking our Inboxes every 5 minutes. But hey, aren't we all emotional people; personal face to face meetings always have an edge over virtual communication since you can best portray yourself in person.
That said, I feel that each one of us (freshman / experience professional) can make a visible difference at workplaces keeping above cues in mind. Personally speaking, if I were to hire somebody(someday ;-)), I would look for people whose attitude can be best described as:

## An exceptional yet humble Rockstar @ work
## Differentiate or Die
## Be Analogue (human)
## Exhibit passion & Emit positive vibes
## Get straight to the Point(Ideas)
## Amaze people around atlest once per week
## KISS (Keep it Sweet & Simple)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Chinmay

Glad to your blogs. This shows that you are at peace and settled down at new place.

with best wishes,
Deepak Gupta

Anonymous said...

Very well drafted post

Anonymous said...

Agreed experience plays a vital role in any profession or rather any aspect of life... experience does guarantee u success in most of the cases, but every coin has 2 sides.
In my view experience sometimes hampers innovations. Experience might develop ur creative intuition but when it is preferred over others u never know which innovation u might have sacrificed and tht might well explain the great fact 'Innovations normally are the results of accidents'... if experience was not in the picture... this wud be phrased as 'Innovations normally results from opportunity'