The leader of the Formula 1 World Championship is 19, his closest rival is 41. Kimi Antonelli has won five of the first seven races. Lewis Hamilton, 41 points behind at Ferrari, just became the oldest race winner since Jack Brabham in 1970. His 106th career victory. His first was in 2007, when Kimi was ten months old.
It is one of the great age contrasts in the sport's history and it made me think about something closer to home.
Feeling old for the first time
When I joined Softcat I felt old for the first time in my life. Genuinely.
The intern, apprenticeship and graduate schemes here are exceptional and the energy that comes with them is obvious from the moment you walk in. But I quickly realised that my cultural references, my jokes, large parts of my professional frame of reference meant absolutely nothing to most of my colleagues. I had spent years accumulating experience and context that was, in many rooms, completely invisible.
That is a humbling moment and it is also a useful one. It forced me to ask what my experience was actually worth. Not in the abstract, not on a CV, but in practice, in the rooms I was in.
Pattern recognition and its trap
Experience gives you pattern recognition. You have seen versions of this problem before. You know which shortcuts work and which ones create debt. You can feel when a conversation is heading somewhere unproductive and you know how to redirect it. That is genuinely valuable and it cannot be fast-tracked.
But it can also become a trap.
If you hold your experience as your only value, you stop learning. You start defending what you know rather than questioning whether it still applies. You treat tenure as authority and the world moves on without telling you.
What I have taken from working alongside people fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years younger than me is something I did not expect. Not just energy, though there is plenty of that. Inspiration. A willingness to challenge things I had stopped questioning. A pace of thinking that does not wait for permission. A complete absence of the reverence for "how we have always done it" that quietly anchors so many experienced leaders and teams.
Holding both at once
The real value of experience is not knowing things. It is knowing when what you know matters and when it does not. It is the willingness to deploy your pattern recognition selectively, and to shut it off when fresh thinking would serve better. It is understanding that learning does not stop when you reach a certain title or tenure. If anything, that is when it matters most.
The best teams I have ever worked in found a way to hold both of those things at the same time. Not as a compromise, as an advantage.