Being Geek

Chapter 40. Bad News About Your Bright Future

You...are kicking ass.

A wealth of experience makes decisions appear to be easy. Experience gives you confidence, and you use that confidence to deliver your experienced decisions with moxie. Those watching you think, boy, he’s got it figured out. The rub is this: confidence is a delicious answer to uncertainty, but confidence is a feeling, a perception. What you’re really banking on is your experience and your history of hard knocks, which have given you a useful and valuable perspective on which to base your decisions.

And experience has a half-life.

Confidence working well with experience creates success, and when you’re successful everyone says, “Way to go!” and you believe those compliments and turn them into additional confidence that turns into more success and then more confidence, and the cycle repeats.

Again, you are kicking ass.

Success. Fame. These are a type of experience, but they aren’t what got you the compliment in the first place. It’s that you did something significant; you worked and did something significant. Not that you said you did something with confidence.

Like any industry, high tech is full of folks who are confusing success and fame with experience. They’re thinking that showing up at conferences, giving interviews, and writing books about things they did in the past is experience. It’s not. It’s storytelling, and while it might be valuable storytelling, these people are slowly becoming echoes ...