Experience and Cows

A lot of people make a big deal about experience. If some people (and some companies) are to be believed, the number of years in a job should be the only criterion of what someone needs to be paid and whether they deserve to be promoted.

However, not all experience is created equal. Experience matters when you are learning on the job, and where you learn the patterns that are inherent in your job, and you can over time replace your “slow thinking” about the job with more “fast thinking”.

If you continue to do the same thing in the same way throughout the years of experience, not bothering to figure out why things are done certain ways, and how things can be done better, the experience isn’t of that much use.

I leave it to former Tottenham Hotspur manager Mauricio Pochettino to explain this concept with a beautiful and profound analogy (there’s a video in this link which I’m somehow unable to embed here).

It is like a cow that, every day in 10 years, sees the train cross in front at the same time.

If you ask the cow, ‘what time is the train going to come’, it is not going to know the right answer.

In football, it is the same. Experience, yes, but hunger, motivation, circumstance, everything is so important.

It is unfortunate that the journalist who covered this story for Sky Sports thought this analogy was bizarre. Maybe he has been doing his job reporting on press conferences in the same way a cow sees a train passing by at a particular time every day?

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