I heard a clip of End of Beginning in a reel I was watching. The song was catchy so I looked it up. The photos of the artist looked familiar. Wait, is that the guy from Stranger Things? It was.
Some people are tremendously talented. They don’t just capture one discipline, they capture multiple. Kubrick is another good example, having made critically aclaimed movies stretching from space to horror to comedy. Marie Curie has two nobel prizes, one in physics and one in chemistry.
The connecting thread is that their talent was sculpted by adversity. Certain difficulty is unavoidable, such as geopolitical or circumstancial issue, and this is by no means advocating for seeking out adversity. Instead, if you are working on something, and you face adversity, and that things comes out the other end, it is a better thing for it. Competition makes you a better competitor.
That means systems should be self enforcing. Being in a market makes you better for that market. This is why time is a proxy for experience. Just by existing as an artist or a scientist, you enforce that you are that thing. It follows that you also face more adversity the longer you are that thing. This feels wrong though. At a certain point, people accept you are that thing and the adversity drops off.
Once you reach the plateau you can do one of two things. You either challenge yourself by iterating on your own ideas, or accept that you have reached your level. If you continue to iterate you will find adversity even in correct ideas. This is because you have a perspective that few others (except those with the same time in role) will understand fully. Eventually they will catch on that your idea is right and it gets cannonized. They will act like it was obvious in hindsight and reject the notion that they ever doubted you or the idea.
And yet talented people live for that. That tiny spike immortalizes them forever. They spend some portion of their lives getting antagonized to eventually have an impact that is so outsized it makes it worth it.
The first conclusion we take from this is that experience plus drive is ultimately the formula for finding competence, not just experience. If you have not pushed yourself in the last several years you are no longer in the same competition as people who have. The second thing is that challenging ideas is good. Where possible, you should challenge ideas. This doesn’t have to come across as crass. You can challenge ideas by first acknowledging what you like about them. If you are working with someone who is driven they will appreciate the challenge. This leads into the final point. You should want your ideas to be challenged. Seek out adversity on your ideas wherever possible. If you are not open to it then you will be doing yourself a disservice.