Day 6: The Myth of Experience: Smarter Doesn’t Mean Safer
Your greatest strength can become your greatest weakness when you stop questioning what you know.
THINGS TO CONSIDER
KEY INSIGHT: Experience can be a double-edged sword. While it brings knowledge, it can also create overconfidence, blind spots, and dangerous shortcuts. Seasoned professionals often fall into predictable traps because they trust their instincts too much and skip critical thinking. True mastery comes not from experience alone, but from pairing experience with deliberate reflection and humility.
PERSONAL REFLECTION: Think of a time when your experience led you to overlook a critical detail or make a false assumption. What red flags did you dismiss because you thought you “knew better”? How might humility have changed your approach?
TODAY’S EXERCISE: Identify a recent decision where you relied heavily on past experience or instinct. Ask yourself: What assumptions did I make? Were they accurate? What information did I skip gathering? What outside perspectives did I dismiss? Consider one specific thing you’ll do differently next time to guard against experience-based overconfidence.