April 3, 2025
Jerry Arbittier
When I was about 18 years old, I walked into a store and spent $300 on one of the first handheld calculators ever made, a Texas Instruments TI-10. Three hundred dollars was serious money back then, and I was proud of it. It felt like the future sitting in my hand.
My mother never bought one.
That might not sound remarkable at first. But here’s the thing: my mother was essentially the CFO of my father’s small business. For years, she managed the bookkeeping, kept the financial records straight, and ran the numbers with quiet precision. She was, without question, smarter than I am. And yet, through all of it, she kept using her mechanical adding machine, the same way she always had.
It wasn’t stubbornness, exactly. It wasn’t a lack of intelligence. It was something subtler and, honestly, more human than that.
She had learned how to do her work well, and she kept doing it that way. The calculator wasn’t a tool she needed. It was a disruption she didn’t.
I’ve been thinking about that image for a long time, my mother, fingers moving across the keys of her adding machine, perfectly capable and completely settled. Because I think it captures something true about how most of us move through our lives…
Is there really a learning tank that fills up early in life?
If we’re lucky, the first 20 to 25 years of life are defined by constant learning. School fills us with new frameworks. New jobs force us to adapt. New friendships expose us to ideas we’d never have found on our own. We are, almost by design, sponges; absorbing, adjusting, growing.
And then, for most people, something quietly shifts.
It’s not dramatic. There’s no moment where you decide to stop learning. It’s more like the urgency fades. You’ve built a set of skills that work. You’ve found your rhythm.
The “learning tank,” as I think of it, got filled up during those early years, and now the plan, whether conscious or not, is to run on that fuel for the rest of your career.
Wild, when you think about it like that, right?
To be fair, something genuinely valuable fills the space that constant learning once occupied: experience. And experience is not nothing. It sharpens judgment. It builds pattern recognition. It gives you a kind of wisdom that no classroom can manufacture. The 45-year-old manager who’s seen three market cycles and two company restructurings brings something to the table that a brilliant 28-year-old simply doesn’t have yet.
But experience, if we’re not careful, can calcify into something else. It can become a story we tell ourselves about why the new way isn’t as good as the old way. It can become the mechanical adding machine we never put down.
Can experience actually be dangerous?
Over the years, I’ve heard a version of the same sentence from many people in their 50s who find themselves suddenly sidelined, passed over for a promotion, struggling in a job search, or feeling invisible in a room full of younger colleagues:
“I have all this experience. Why wouldn’t companies want to use it?”
It’s a reasonable question. It also, I’ve come to believe, misses the point.
Companies do want experience. What they’re less patient with is experience that stopped updating itself. The person with 25 years of expertise who also kept learning, who stayed curious, adopted new tools, challenged their own assumptions along the way, that person is extraordinarily valuable.
The person with 25 years of expertise who coasted on the foundation they built at 30? That’s a harder case to make.
The cruel irony is that by the time someone is asking that question — why wouldn’t they want my experience? — the gap has often been growing for years. The calcification happened slowly, almost invisibly, and then all at once it became a problem.
How do we avoid this “stagnance”?
The 25-to-50 window is the most consequential stretch of most people’s professional lives. It’s when careers are built, reputations are established, and the compounding effects of good habits (or bad ones) really start to show up.
And the most important habit, the one that separates the people who thrive in their 50s and 60s from the ones who feel left behind, is staying genuinely, actively curious. Not performatively curious. Not “I read the occasional article” curious.
But the kind of curiosity that makes you willing to be a beginner again, even when you’re an expert. The kind that lets you pick up a new tool, a new framework, or a new way of thinking without needing it to validate everything you already know.
Most of us have that blind spot. The question is whether we’re willing to look for it.
The “calculator” is always coming. The only real choice is whether you’re the person who buys one, or the person who keeps reaching for the adding machine.
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