Last week I wrote about experience, and how critical it is to acknowledge and build on and take your experience. I harped on this idea that reinvention may dramatically panic us into thinking our careers (or lives) need a control-alt-delete-blow-on-the-cartridge Start Over.
And as soon as I hit publish, I questioned this whole notion of experience. Slightly insufferable, to be inspired by your own writing. And then yesterday I spent a day with 50 colleagues - all with various and varying work experiences - each concurrently delivering the exact same, nine-hour communications training program. So: experience. We’re back here.
At the same time that I’m advocating and asking for all of us to please celebrate and take our experience with us…
…I’m also aware that no one else really cares about our experience. I’m talking strictly work experience here. After you’ve gotten the job and you’re ready to deliver, who really gives a shit about what you’ve done? They care about what you do, right now.
I moved from Chicago to California nearly 14 years ago. It was a move that was both well thought out and a complete knee-jerk reaction to life at the time (perhaps more on that later). I loved my job in Chicago. It opened up the world. I traveled often, met incredible leaders, and connected people and ideas across continents. The experience was absolutely transformational, and I somehow got into it with some campus recruiting experience and a master’s degree. It felt like a big job and after six years of doing this big job…
I also felt like somebody.
My husband has a phrase from one of his mentors: “Don’t believe your own headlines.” I didn’t know John - or that phrase - then, but I surely believed my own headlines. I felt like somebody.
And that could be a dangerous feeling. Looking back, I might have been a little late leaving Chicago, because by the time I landed on the west coast I had also started to act like somebody.
I started at Electronic Arts, EA, in 2011. There I was, in the game, with a University Relations/campus recruiting team. It was big—and could’ve been fun. Video games, college students…one EA office even had a ball pit (those kind of corporate quirks were quite a thing, for a while). At one point I had a full sit-down conversation with Anthony Daniels (C-3PO!). It could’ve been really freaking fun to be in this campus recruiting role in this wildly different and new environment!
Could’ve been. But there I was, feeling like I was back in the campus recruiting role I’d had 10 years prior.
It could’ve been fun, if I hadn’t been sulking. Driving to a campus Tech Talk a few months after I started, I remember thinking—this again? I’ve done this! I’ve done so much since! Don’t they know what I’ve done?
Don’t they know what I’ve done? There’s a book called Don’t You Know Who I Am? How to stay sane in an era of narcissism... It’s not lost on me how close I was to insanity.
I was all kinds of wrapped up in my own self-published headlines. I was in my early- to mid-30s, enamored with my own experience. I can right now hear my mentor Maureen Taylor say “of course you were wrapped up in your experience…you were 32…!” And I whole-heartedly agree. I get it. Now.
My experience. No one cared. Why would they?! My credibility was assumed to be high because I had gotten the job, and yet I was spending more time lamenting that no one was - what? - carrying around my resume? All anyone cared about is what I did that day, and how I did it. They cared that the work I was doing in that moment was excellent and added value. They were - rightly and righteously so - focused on the present, right here, right now. And here I was, admiring my own history.
If I could have gotten out of my own way (and head, and ego) I would have realized that what I was invited to contribute to at EA was so different and cool. Video games were changing. Madden and Mass Effect - these unbelievably immersive worlds - were being challenged by a game that let people tend to crops and plant vegetables on Facebook, and another that had exploding lollipops. This entire genre was investing and inventing…
…and I was too busy wrapped up in my own experience. I was there for it, but I missed it. I was not, as it turns out, in the game.
In the professional ins and outs and day to days, no one cares about our individual professional experience. They care about what we do and how we make them feel in that moment. The program I did yesterday: 50 colleagues all delivering the exact same communications program, concurrently. We’re all different ages, titles, tenures, experiences. And I guarantee once the door shut to each room and the program kicked off, all the participants cared about was the experience they were having, right there. That day. They didn’t care about what got their particular instructor there, they just cared about the there.
I wish I could say that the EA experience was the last time I believed my own headlines. It wasn’t, and perhaps I’ll share more about those more recent stories in the future. For today:
Yes, our experience will inform the decisions we make and actions we take, but does everyone need to know that? Maybe stop. Consider. Look around. Listen to what you’re being asked to do and look for where you can add value. In any new role, you’ll likely be asked to do something that has something to do with some part of your experience. Relish that, and do that work freaking brilliantly. Find comfort in the familiarity, even within a new context, and go flourish. You’re going to be asked to do a ton of things you’ve never done before - and you’ll certainly stumble and fall and fail. In the places that do seem familiar, don’t let your ego trip you up.
So whether you’re 32 like I was—or 20, 47, 59, whatever—acknowledge your experience. Celebrate it. Take it there. Build on it. Invent. And also have the confidence to just do good work now. Check yourself in the moment. Who cares what they know about your experience?
They care about what you do.
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