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Experience skips the dumb question
Peter Rahal started his first company with no real experience, and he finds that good reasoning skills and the ability to learn matter more. Experience is valuable, but it means you move faster through problems without testing whether the old answer fits. Luca Ferrari, who built Bending Spoons in Milan, prefers young graduates or people who never graduated over experienced hires, because he does not want their bad experience.
The best mix, Rahal finds, is some inexperience and some damage: people with a chip on their shoulder who have something to prove and do not give up. One person on his team will die before he fails, shaped by a life that was not comfortable. Too many of them break things, so rational, pragmatic, more conservative people balance the team.
Why does expertise sometimes block fresh thinking?
In 1942 psychologist Abraham Luchins gave people water-jar puzzles, first training them on problems that needed a long method. When later problems had a much simpler solution, many kept using the long method, and some missed the shortcut entirely. The effect is called Einstellung, German for setting or attitude. A 2008 eye-tracking study of chess players by Merim Bilalic and colleagues found expert players missing a shorter checkmate because a familiar one caught their attention.
How does hardship shape resilience?
A 2010 study by Mark Seery, Alison Holman, and Roxane Cohen Silver in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology followed more than 2,000 Americans over several years. It found that people with a moderate amount of lifetime adversity reported better mental health and well-being than those with none or with a lot.
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