The most anxiety-inducing thing about a career is that most of the experience you accumulate consists of conclusions — you rarely understand why things work the way they do, or what factors actually drive the results.
This is because at work, you’re typically responsible for just one piece of the puzzle. You’re not part of the decision-making process, so you can’t see the full picture from where you stand, and you don’t have the access to gather the broader information that would make sense of it all.
The end result? When the industry is stable, your experience is valuable. The moment the industry shifts significantly, that same experience becomes worthless overnight.
Take early internet user growth as an example. Back then, acquiring users was straightforward: buy advertising placements across major websites. The people managing these channel buys simply needed to keep the return on ad spend in check.
The experience they built up looked like this: which websites had cheaper ad slots, which placements drove the most traffic, what kinds of image creatives got the highest click-through rates.
Then, a few years later, online advertising costs skyrocketed. Many companies stopped running online ads altogether — and everything those people had spent years learning became completely useless.
At its core, what this person was doing was a specific task — not a function, not a role.
It’s like working at a big restaurant where your only job is to slice scallions into thin strips. Everything else is someone else’s concern. Even if you can cut those strips faster and finer than anyone, does that make you a chef?
The moment popular tastes change and the dumpling filling no longer calls for scallions, all those years of skill are suddenly worthless.