Commentary: How to weaponize your experience

Use your experience to build, not demean

Do you know how to build a radio? Or are you just from a society that has radios? Which answer should we brag about?

A very old show that would never get made now is Gilligan’s Island, whose premise was that a group of people become stranded on a desert island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean after their boat tour¹ gets lost. One of these characters is The Professor and over a series of episodes the castaways help him create thing like:

• dental drill

• lie detector tests

• a washing machine

• Geiger counters

• battery charger

• jet pack fuel

These items are created from first principles and limited materials (primarily coconuts). It is a running gag on the show, but a useful thought experiment. Can you pass the Gilligan’s Island Test? If you were stranded on a desert island, or starting a company from scratch, could you build impressive things from raw materials?

Or think about it another way: if you traveled back in time, could you speed up the technical progress to our present, or would you go crazy with grief at knowing that things could be better but aren’t?

Be a magic wand

The awesome and famous place you are from, like Google let’s say, is a massively impressive organization, and being able to get a job there means you are wicked smart and have valuable experience. But what Google has accomplished and the accomplishment of getting a job there are two different things. You are from a place, you didn’t build it. Making a past accomplishment a part of your identity is dangerious.

Building Google or turning your current company into something closer to Google are not equivalent to working at Google. Waving a magic wand and creating the same engineering maturity as Google would be great, and guess what: you are the magic wand. You need to understand your current company better than you understood things while at Google and apply that knowledge to improve it in an appropriate way.

I am sorry you no longer work at Google. Everybody knows that you no longer work there, you need to know this too. Start focusing on improving life on the island by taking what you have where you are and working to improve it. You have the advantage of having a high water mark, an example, to work towards. This might have been why you were hired. When you make suggestions based on how things were done there, be careful to apply them correctly, and feel free to leave off the attribution that it was how it was done back at Google.

1. “a three-hour tour”: The TripAdvisor reviews for this tour would be brutal.