Experience is just an opportunity to learn

A few years ago, in my startup, we were building a tech platform that was performing horribly. The screens would take forever to load — clearly, the algorithms were poorly written.

Though we had experienced engineers, we did not have the funding to hire very expensive talent.

So I asked a team member, who had an obsessive problem-solving ability, to learn technology and fix the problems. She was aghast — how could she learn programming from scratch and do something that these experienced people could not?

I told her not to worry, and to get started — people who dare can do a lot more than people who merely have experience.

Over the next six months, this team member learned Ruby on Rails from scratch and fixed every performance problem. She was now the de-facto CTO leading people who had 10+ years of coding experience. We hugely underestimate the power of learning.

Experience is just an opportunity to learn, not a guarantee that we will.

If you dip a piece of sponge and a stone in water, only one of them soaks it.

Experience is akin to the time spent in water. Soaking is totally up to us.

– Rajan

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