- Learn Faster
- Posts
- The School of Experience
The School of Experience
Wade Anderson
August 30, 2024
What does it take to have a successful career and how do I develop into a better leader and entrepreneur?
One of my favorite books, How Will You Measure Your Life by Clay Christensen, has a framework I want to explore with you.
Christensen calls it the School of Experience. He says (page 143):
A challenging job, a failure in leading a project, an assignment in a new area of the company—all those things become “courses” in the school of experience. The skills that leaders have—or lack—depend heavily on which “courses,” so to speak, they have and have not taken along the way.
The framework is simple. Make choices in your career on the jobs you’ll take, the projects you’ll own, etc. that help you develop as if you were choosing courses from a course catalog at a university.
...
When I was going into my MBA, I would spend too many hours thinking about the courses I would want. Look at how many great courses there are!
I wanted to maximize the 10 slots I had for my elective curriculum by choosing courses that helped me learn the skills I could use later in my career.
I can use this same mindset now with job and project choices.
Will this job teach me something new that will help me develop as an entrepreneur?
What will I learn in the next two years that will help me develop?
What kind of projects will I take on?
As Christensen writes we should ask ourselves:
“What are all the experiences and problems that I have to learn about and master so that what comes out at the other end is somebody who is ready and capable of becoming a successful CEO?”
“I wouldn’t ever make the decision based upon how much it paid or the prestige,” he told my students “Instead, it was always: is it going to give me the experiences I need to wrestle with?”
Replace [successful CEO] with your goal and ambition. Think through your options. Choose the experiences you want to “wrestle with.”
#HappyLearning
Reply