Life Changes Our Role Just as We Learn It

There is an old Chinese saying: “Old ginger is spicier.” Another, more playful saying on the internet goes, “The old master is still the master.” Both capture something familiar. Young people often dismiss those who have more experience. They have their own ideas and doubt that the warnings they hear really apply to them. Only after making mistakes, being taken in or running into difficulties do they suddenly realise that those seemingly tiresome reminders contain years of experience and hard-earned lessons.

But there is something more interesting behind this. The same pattern repeats throughout our lives. Just as we learn how to handle one role, life moves us into another, and once again we are beginners.

As students, we may think our teachers are too strict. Only when we stand in front of a classroom ourselves do we begin to understand the difficulties our teachers faced. As children, we may find our parents' constant advice irritating. When we become parents, we discover how much worry and responsibility raising a child involves. Then, just as we have finally gained some experience as parents, our children grow up and we become grandparents. That brings another kind of relationship. We may suddenly understand why our own parents behaved so differently towards their grandchildren.

That is how life goes. We keep moving from one role to the next. Just as the past begins to make sense, we are confronted with a new set of unknowns. I once heard a wonderfully funny remark attributed to an older person: “Please forgive our clumsy behaviour. This is our first time being old, and we have no experience.” It makes us laugh, but think about it. Who has experience of being old before becoming old? Even someone who reaches a very advanced age is living through that age for the first time. A lack of experience is not a problem peculiar to the young. It follows all of us as our roles change.

That is precisely why we should be careful about dismissing other people's opinions, particularly warnings from those who have already been through something similar. It is easy to reject a different view on the strength of our own assumptions, forgetting that the experience needed to assess it may be the very thing we lack.

And we should never underestimate people who have failed or paid a price for their mistakes. We are naturally drawn to successful people explaining how they succeeded, but we often overlook how survivorship bias may shape their conclusions. Someone who has thought seriously about a failure may have a clearer sense of which approaches do not work and where the risks lie. When such a person is willing to share lessons learned at a cost, especially before we have entered that role ourselves, it is worth listening. Their warning may reveal a blind spot we did not know we had.

A few days ago, I wrote something that comes to mind again here: when we do not know something, we often do not even know that we do not know it. Because our roles keep changing, these moments of unrecognised ignorance are almost unavoidable. So when someone is willing to offer advice, whether drawn from success or, especially, from failure, it is worth hearing them out. Even if we cannot yet agree, we can at least hold on to an insight that may prove useful to our future selves. Perhaps listening is the best preparation available to us: when we next enter an unfamiliar role, we may be a little less unprepared and a little more at ease.