What Left-Handedness Taught Me About Experience
At the 1980 Olympics, all six finalists in the men’s foil fencing were left-handed. This is surprising given that left-handers make up only about 10% of the population. The same pattern appears in boxing, table tennis and baseball. Left-handers do particularly well in sports where competitors directly interact. Author David Epstein explores this in a […]
What Moneyball Taught Me About Experience
I recently rewatched the movie Moneyball. On the surface, it looks like a story about statistics defeating intuition. But when I looked at it through the lens of experience, I found myself thinking about a different question: Whose experience do we choose to trust? To answer that, you need to know something about Billy Beane […]
What does Intuition actually feel like? With Maria Di Pietro
Where does intuition actually come from? And what does it feel like when you just know something? After more than 25 years working with people, psychologist Maria Di Pietro says she sometimes knows something without being able to explain exactly how. She calls it intuition. But there’s an important qualification: it’s intuition backed by experience. […]
What Bruce Lee taught me about Experience
Traditional martial artists spend years perfecting a punch. Bruce Lee became fascinated by something else. He stopped concentrating on the actual punch and became fascinated by what created a punch. At first, that sounds like a small shift. But, I don’t think it is. Traditional martial artists trained in techniques. They drilled the same punch […]
What a Wheelchair Ramp Taught Me About Experience
Recently, I posted an article on LinkedIn, What an Assassin Taught Me About Experience. In the comments, Nicola added that she notices wheelchair access wherever she goes, not because of her work, but because her sister uses a wheelchair. Like Jason Bourne, her experience had trained her attention. I replied that this was a great […]
When Experience Becomes Intuition with Maria Di Pietro
After more than 25 years as a psychologist, Maria Di Pietro often knows something about the person sitting in front of her. She can’t necessarily explain how. She calls it intuition. But, “It’s intuition with experience.” What happens to our experience when we’ve accumulated so much of it that we no longer consciously think through what […]
What a Glassblower taught me about Experience
It takes years to become a master. But is the amount of time the crucial element? As US artist Rick Strini said, ‘You don’t get good by doing anything once.’ Rick has more than sixty years working with glass but for the first 30 years he made the same thing. Then Rick went to a […]
I Can See Your Potential Before You Can with Maria Di Pietro
Sometimes other people can see something in us that we can’t yet see ourselves. After more than 25 years as a psychologist, Maria Di Pietro says she can often see the potential in people before they can see it themselves. Earlier in her career, that frustrated her. If she could see what was possible, why […]
What an Educator Taught Me About Experience
Most people assume education is the transfer of knowledge. But in my On Experience conversation with educator and facilitator Linda Gidlund, I realised I may have misunderstood education altogether. After four decades as a teacher, facilitator, instructional designer and community leader, Linda rarely spoke about information. Instead, she kept returning to something much deeper. Most […]
The Danger of Thinking “I’ve seen this before” – Michael Henderson
What happens when a familiar pattern makes us too certain about what we’re seeing? In this short extract from On Experience, corporate anthropologist Michael Henderson tells a story about walking into a situation convinced he’d seen it before. What happened next reveals something fascinating about expertise, assumptions and getting things wrong. ? Edited Transcript Geoff: […]