Expansive, Not Experienced
Experience taught us yesterday—expansiveness creates tomorrow.
Last week in Australia, a thought ambushed me.
It was the same one that haunted me years ago when I left design school.
Back then, I was armed with curiosity wider than any agency’s job description, but no agency wanted that.
Too many interests.
Not enough “experience.”
Translation: I didn’t fit their template.
Fast forward to today—when experience itself feels like a template.
A predictable pattern etched in resumes and LinkedIn feeds.
But what if the true value now lies not in the years you’ve clocked, but in the edges you’ve kept alive?
Because here’s the paradox we’re living in:
Everything can happen instantly.
Everything can be learned on demand.
Everything can be replicated by machines.
So what does experience really buy you?
Wisdom? Maybe.
But sometimes it buys you blind spots, too.
For leaders, this isn’t a philosophical riddle—it’s a business one.
If your teams are optimized for “experience,” are you unconsciously filtering out the misfits, the multi-hyphenates, the strange thinkers who could help you see around corners?
The uncomfortable truth: your next breakthrough probably won’t come from someone “qualified.”
It’ll come from someone who sees your category sideways, who stitches together signals from far outside your industry, who’s still naïve enough to try what experience would dismiss as impossible.
So maybe the question isn’t does experience still matter?
The sharper question is: which kind of experience matters now?
The lived scars that teach resilience? Yes.
The patterned ruts that calcify judgment? Less so.
If the past was about expertise, the future may be about expansiveness.
A portfolio of lived collisions, not a ladder of linear wins.
And that means our job—as CEOs, CMOs, and brand builders—is to create space where curiosity counts as much as credentials.
Where experience isn’t the barrier to entry, but the bridge to reinvention.
Because in a world where everything can happen quickly, the real value is not how long you’ve been in the game—
but how willing you are to play it differently.
August 19, 2025
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