What if Your Experience is Outdated With Mark Molony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 gaining more experience. It may be knowing which experiences still apply.

This conversation explores certainty, change, judgment, and why some of the assumptions that once served us well may need to be revisited.

Watch the full excerpt and see where the conversation leads.

Edited Transcript

Mark: I think the pace of action, choice and decision-making is probably faster today, and an expectation that it’s faster perhaps than ever before.

Geoff: Maybe that’s the key word, the expectation of response.

Mark: Yeah. I could see how, with an expectation like that, the push to go back to, if you’ve seen it before, to go to your experience and make a decision. You know?

Geoff: Mmm.

Mark: To cut through, let’s get on. So yeah. I think the context of culture and society and technologies and a range of other things has pushed us in a way to default to that experience.

Geoff: And when the world’s changing as well, we’re kind of at a… Like a double whammy, the expectation is to be faster and making more potentially complicated decisions.

Mark: Yeah, I think so. And, you know, a prime example, if you look at the Ukraine-Russian War, I’m sure the Russians thought, from their experience with other wars, that they had the armaments and the firepower to run the Ukrainians out of town.

Geoff: Yeah.

Mark: Right? But, but it didn’t work that way. Things have changed. There’s different experiences, there’s different technologies, there’s different ways of responding, which I’m not sure in the early phases of the war they, they were aware of. So yeah, I think this is one of the traps in a society and a culture that is so rapidly changing. Maybe [our experience] has a use-by date.

Geoff: Mmm.

Mark: Yeah. So you might sit there and go… And I’ve found myself saying that to a few people. They’ve asked me, “Oh, you know, you’ve had some experience with this. What are your thoughts about it?” And I say, “Well, yeah, I’ve had experience, but that’s 20 years ago. It’s not the same now.

Geoff: Yeah.

Mark: It’s changed. So my experience and the relevance of my experience has almost hit its use-by date. And that’s a hard thing to swallow sometimes too, because we get invested in the experiences we both talked about earlier.

Geoff: Well, as you said, we get this crossover between my identity and my experience.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. So, so there’s a lot caught up in all this experience stuff, isn’t there really?