Twenty Years of Experience—or One Year, Twenty Times?

There’s a difference between having 20 years of experience and having one year of experience repeated 20 times.

Time doesn’t automatically make us wiser.

You can go through the same meetings, the same conflicts, the same leadership challenges and the same decisions for years—and still miss what those experiences were trying to teach you.

Growth happens when you examine what happened.

• What did I miss?
• What did I assume?
• What worked—and why?
• Where did my leadership contribute to the outcome?
• What would I do differently now?

That’s where experience becomes insight.

And because you’re not the same person you were when the experience happened, you can often look back through a more developed lens and finally see what you couldn’t see then.

Don’t just accumulate years. Extract the wisdom from them.

That’s how leaders grow.