Why This Doctor Stopped Healing Patients Dr Patterson Stark

You’d expect fifty years of experience to make a doctor more confident in his ability to heal people. Instead, it led Dr Patterson Stark to the opposite conclusion, “I realised I couldn’t heal anybody.” Experience Doesn’t Just Add Knowledge We often think experience makes us better because we know more, but Patterson’s story suggests something […]
A Comic Book and Sustainability with Philippe Guichard

For Industrial Designer Philippe Guichard sustainability started before his career began in the unlikely place of a comic book. Since then, it is been a normal part of his design process and how he sees the world. In this excerpt from On Experience, Philippe tells the simple story of how a man and his son in […]
The Things We Learn to See with Philippe Guichard

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Industrial Designer Philippe Guichard for a conversation on experience. I thought we would be talking about design. And we did. But as often happens with these On Experience conversations, the topic gradually shifted. What started as a discussion about products, creativity and culture slowly became a conversation about perception. It […]
Failure Changed My Design Philosophy with Philippe Guichard

When Industrial Designer Philippe Guichard started his career as a designer, success was partly about proving himself. Then he lost everything. In this excerpt from On Experience, Philippe reflects on how losing his business, combined with years of meditation practice, fundamentally changed the way he approaches design, work and life. What emerged wasn’t a better design process. It […]
What Designers Notice with Philippe Guichard

What do designers notice that other people miss? When Industrial Designer Philippe Guichard walks into a room, he isn’t looking at the paintings on the wall. He’s looking at the lights, the switches, the chairs, the proportions… In this excerpt from On Experience, we explore how years of experience reshape attention itself. Because expertise isn’t […]
Your Experience Has a Use-By Date with Mark Molony

A few days after my first conversation with mindfulness teacher Mark Molony, he contacted me with a simple message: “I’ve had some more thoughts.” That message captures something important about the purpose of On Experience. The most meaningful conversations do not end when the recording stops. They continue working on us. New ideas keep coming, distinctions get […]
Experience is Just a Memory with Mark Molony

We often talk about learning from experience. But what if experience isn’t what we think it is? In this excerpt from my On Experience conversation with mindfulness teacher Mark Molony, we explore a surprising idea: Perhaps we don’t carry our experiences forward at all. Perhaps we carry our memories of those experiences. And if memory is […]
What if Your Experience is Outdated With Mark Molony

You’ve spent years building your experience. But what if some of it is quietly becoming less useful? In this excerpt from my On Experience conversation with mindfulness teacher Mark Molony, we explore a question that many experienced professionals rarely ask: Could experience have a use-by date? As the pace of change accelerates, the challenge may not be […]
On Experience – Why This Conversation Exists

For most of my career, I’ve been wrestling with the same question: How do you turn what you know into something of value? And inside that, what allows one person to cut through and have a flourishing career while others with similar experience and expertise don’t? That’s been a personal challenge and a common conversation […]
When Experience Works Against You with Mark Molony

When Mark Molony walked into his first day as a social worker, he thought his training had prepared him for anything. Then a grieving widow said six words and every assumption he had fell apart. In this extract from our On Experience conversation, Mark, now a Mindfulness Teacher, exposes the insight that the most dangerous […]