When You Are the Voice of Experience… 2 Questions to Ask Yourself 

When you are young, you have the liberty to take up futile causes. You have the time to spend on them, and more time to abandon them when they go awry. When you are older, you can’t waste your time on idea experiments you’ve already seen fail.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t voice your opinion. You should. But you must do so realizing that for some of the most important questions in life – questions about what will happen if you do this or that – most people can’t learn by listening to the wisdom of their elders. They must try out their ideas for themselves.

When this happens with a young employee, I have made it a rule to ask myself two questions:

1. “How important is this young person to the business?” If the answer is “not important,” I ignore the protest and insist on doing things my way. But when the answer is “very important,” I then ask myself…
2. “If I let him/her learn through experience, will it be a mortal blow to the business or just a setback from which we can recover?” If it’s the latter, I acquiesce, knowing I will have a smarter superstar employee as a result.