Not All Experience Is Equal

We’ve been fooled by a simple equation. Years of experience = expertise. It’s wrong, and it’s missing the entire strategic progression of how real expertise actually builds.

The False Math vs. The Strategic Math

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: 100 × 1 >> 1 × 100, but that’s just the beginning.

The Repeater: 1 × 100. Five years doing the same task over and over.

The Explorer: 100 × 1. Five years trying 100 different things once.

The Strategist: 20 × 5. Five years going deep on the 20 highest-leverage activities.

The Explorer beats the Repeater. But the Strategist beats them both because they used a funnel approach.

The Career Growth Funnel

As you mature in your career, here’s the strategic progression:

Exposure (1000): Cast the widest net. Be curious about everything in your domain.

Experiment (100): From those 1000 possibilities, actively try 100 different approaches, projects, or challenges.

Experience (80): Of the 100 you tried, about 80 will give you meaningful learnings worth remembering.

Expertise (20): Here’s the critical filter. Identify the 20 highest-leverage activities that matter most for your goals and impact.

Efficiency, Effectiveness, Efficacy: Now go deep. These 20 activities become your 20 × n multiplier.

Why the Funnel Matters

Without trying the 100, you can’t identify the crucial 20. Most people either never experiment broadly enough (they pick their “20” randomly) or experiment but never focus (they stay stuck at 100 × 1).

The funnel is your filtering mechanism. Use the 100 as your experiment ground, then strategically zero in on the few activities where you’ll build true expertise. This prevents spreading yourself thin while ensuring you’ve actually found the right things to go deep on.

What We Should Measure Instead

Experience tells you how long someone has been somewhere. Exposure tells you how much they’ve actually learned.

Exposure is uncomfortable. It means facing unfamiliar problems, working with different stakeholders, adapting to new constraints. It’s the discomfort zone most people avoid—but it’s where real growth happens.

The Exposure Question

Stop asking: “How many years of experience do you have?”

Start asking: “What’s your funnel progression? How many things have you tried, and which few have you chosen to master?”

A developer who has built the same XYZ app 50 times represents 1 × 50. A developer who has dabbled in 50 different technologies represents 50 × 1 is better, but still incomplete.

But the developer who experimented with 50 technologies, gained real experience in 30, and now focuses deeply on the 10 most strategic ones? That’s 10 × 8, 10 × 12. Exponentially more valuable because they used the funnel to find their leverage points.

Why This Matters

When you’re hiring, promoting, or evaluating talent, experience is a terrible gauge of someone’s relevance and problem-solving ability.

High exposure creates pattern recognition across domains. It builds adaptability. It teaches you to see problems from multiple angles and draw solutions from a broader toolkit.

The person with diverse exposure doesn’t just know more, they think differently. And in a world of complex, evolving challenges, that’s what actually matters.