Filipinos have a sharp expression for someone who keeps getting older without seeming to learn from experience: tumatanda na walang pinagkatandaan.
We usually say it with frustration, sometimes with humor. But there is an important truth inside the phrase. Time passes. Experiences accumulate. The person encounters the same kinds of problems, makes choices, sees what happens—and somehow keeps making the same mistakes.
The same thing can happen at work.
A supervisor can spend ten years managing people without becoming much better at managing people. A manager can conduct hundreds of meetings while continuing to dominate every discussion. A salesperson can make thousands of calls while repeating the same weak response whenever a customer objects. A facilitator can conduct the same workshop dozens of times without noticing why one activity consistently falls flat.
Years of experience tell us how long someone has been doing the work.
They do not tell us how much the person has learned from doing it.
I discovered this for myself when I was teaching. I was in the classroom every day. I prepared lessons, explained ideas, asked questions, watched students respond, and then went home to prepare for another day.
That certainly gave me experience.
But experience alone did not tell me why one lesson worked while another struggled. It did not tell me why one question opened up a rich discussion while another created blank faces. It did not tell me why one class understood an idea quickly and another needed three different explanations.
Something changed when I stopped treating the end of the class as the end of the work.
I began looking back.
Where did the students become interested? Where did I lose them? Which example made the idea clearer? What did I explain poorly? Was there a question I should have asked earlier? What would I do differently if I taught the same lesson tomorrow?
Then tomorrow gave me another attempt.
That was when routine began to become practice.
Experience Gives You Repetitions. It Does Not Guarantee Improvement.
There is a comfortable assumption that people naturally become better the longer they do something.
Sometimes they do. Familiarity reduces effort. People recognize patterns faster. They learn shortcuts and become more confident.
But familiarity is not the same as mastery.
If you repeatedly practise a poor response, that response may simply become easier to perform.
Think about a supervisor whose employee walks into the office and says, “Boss, we have a problem.”
The supervisor immediately asks what happened, decides what should be done, and gives instructions.
The problem gets solved.
A few days later another employee arrives with another problem. The supervisor does the same thing. After several months, the supervisor has become very efficient at solving the team’s problems.
That looks like competence.
But another pattern is also being practised. Employees are learning that when the situation becomes difficult, the supervisor will decide.
The supervisor gets another repetition in rescuing.
The employees get another repetition in returning ownership.
If this happens often enough, everyone becomes very good at playing the wrong game.
That is why Execution Is the Daily Practice of Strategy matters. What people repeatedly do in recurring situations eventually becomes how the organization operates. Daily work is constantly practising something, whether leaders designed that practice intentionally or not.
A routine is a repetition machine.
The question is: What are you repeatedly practising?
The 10,000-Hour Idea Misses Something Important
Many people have heard some version of the 10,000-hour rule: spend enough hours practising something and eventually you become an expert.
It is an attractive idea because it makes mastery sound almost mechanical. Put in the hours. Keep showing up. Accumulate enough repetitions. Expertise will eventually arrive.
But the research behind the popular idea was concerned with something more demanding than simply putting in time.
It was about deliberate practice.
That distinction changes everything.
Ten thousand hours of doing the same thing in the same way can make a person very experienced at repeating the same pattern. It does not guarantee that the pattern is good.
Consider meetings.
A manager who has been leading weekly meetings for fifteen years may easily have thousands of hours of meeting experience. But if every meeting starts without a clear purpose, gets swallowed by status updates, wanders into problems that only concern two people, and ends without clear ownership, the hours have not produced mastery.
The manager may simply have made that meeting pattern automatic.
Time gives us repetitions.
Improvement requires more.
We need something to aim for. We need feedback about what actually happened. We need to notice the gap between our intention and our result. Then we need another attempt in which we change something based on what the previous attempt taught us.
This is why mastery is not built by counting hours.
It is built by learning from repetitions.
Do Not Try to Become “1% Better” at Everything
Another popular idea says we should try to become one percent better every day.
I understand why the idea is attractive. Small improvements feel possible. And repeated small improvements can eventually create large changes.
But there is a problem when we take the number too literally.
What does it mean to become exactly one percent better at delegation today?
How would you know that your coaching conversation improved by 1.0 percent? Is tomorrow’s meeting supposed to be 1.01 times better than today’s?
Human performance does not move in such a neat line.
Sometimes we improve quickly. Sometimes we struggle for weeks. Sometimes we try a new response and discover that it makes things worse. Sometimes the most useful lesson is realizing that the problem we have been trying to solve is not the real problem at all.
So I would not ask a supervisor to become one percent better every day.
I would ask something more practical:
What can you learn from this attempt that will help you make the next one better?
That is small enough to use and serious enough to matter.
A manager might change one question in the next delegation conversation. A team leader might shorten one part of tomorrow’s huddle. A salesperson might test a different way of responding to one recurring objection. A customer service team might change how employees explain the next step before ending a call.
Then they watch what happens.
The change may create a small improvement. It may produce a large one. It may fail.
Whatever happens gives them something the motivational slogan cannot provide:
evidence for the next rep.
Find the Recurring Moment Worth Mastering
“Become a better leader” is too large to practise.
“Communicate better” is too vague.
“Improve my people skills” gives you no clear moment in which to begin.
Mastery becomes more practical when you identify a situation that keeps returning.
Perhaps employees frequently bring problems back to you.
Perhaps your meetings regularly end without decisions.
Maybe you have difficulty giving corrective feedback without making people defensive. Perhaps delegated assignments keep coming back late or incomplete. Maybe your team struggles whenever work moves from one department to another.
These recurring moments are valuable because the work keeps giving you another opportunity.
This is one of the reasons I argue in From Strategy to Daily Behavior that strategy has to reach the recurring moments where people decide what to do next. Broad intentions become useful when people can recognize the situation and call a practical response.
Suppose you choose delegation.
Instead of trying to “delegate better,” look at one recurring moment: the employee returns an assignment and asks you to make a decision that should already belong to them.
Now you have something you can examine.
What did you say when you delegated the work? Was the result clear? Did you define the boundary? Did the employee know which decisions they could make without you? Did your previous behavior teach them to return important decisions for approval?
The situation becomes your practice field.
Give Yourself a Play You Can Actually Practise
Improvement becomes difficult when the desired behavior is vague.
“Empower people” sounds good, but you cannot easily practise it tomorrow at 10:15 a.m.
A play gives you something more concrete.
For example, when an employee returns with a problem, the supervisor might resist solving it immediately and first ask:
“What do you think we should do?”
That one question does not solve every ownership problem. But now the supervisor has a response they can deliberately practise when the recurring moment appears.
The employee says, “Boss, we have a problem.”
The old play is ready: ask questions, take over, decide.
The new play has to compete with something the supervisor may have rehearsed hundreds of times.
So the supervisor tries the question.
“What do you think we should do?”
The employee freezes.
That is evidence.
Perhaps the employee has never been expected to arrive with a recommendation. The supervisor may need to make the expectation clearer earlier. Maybe the next version becomes, “Bring me the problem, the options you see, and what you recommend.”
Now the play has improved because the first attempt taught something.
This is very different from learning a leadership concept once and hoping it becomes behavior.
It is repeated playmaking in real work.
Review the Rep While You Can Still Remember It
One of the easiest ways to lose a learning opportunity is to wait too long.
A difficult conversation happens on Tuesday, but nobody discusses it until the end of the month. By then, people remember conclusions but not the details that produced them.
What words were used?
Where did the conversation turn?
What did the employee say that made the manager become defensive?
What assumption was the supervisor making at that moment?
Fresh evidence gives us much more to work with.
This is why Coach the Work While It Is Still Happening is such an important leadership practice. Coaching does not always have to be a scheduled hour with a formal framework. Some of the best coaching can happen close to an actual attempt, when both people can still reconstruct what happened.
Imagine a supervisor who has just finished giving corrective feedback to an employee.
Instead of simply asking, “How did it go?” the manager might ask, “At what point did the employee become defensive?”
The supervisor thinks.
“When I told him he always waits until the deadline.”
“What happened just before that?”
“I had been describing two specific incidents. He was listening. Then I said ‘always.’”
Now the supervisor sees something useful.
The next feedback conversation provides another repetition—but not the same repetition.
There is now something to practise differently.
Change One Thing Before the Next Rep
Reflection can become another activity that feels useful without changing anything.
People journal. Teams hold retrospectives. Managers ask what went well and what could be improved.
Everyone nods.
Then the next situation arrives and they respond exactly as before.
Reflection produces learning only when something travels into the next attempt.
That is why I like a very practical question:
What will you do differently on the next rep?
Not ten changes.
One is often enough.
Perhaps you will define the decision boundary before giving the assignment.
Perhaps you will ask for the employee’s recommendation before offering yours.
Perhaps you will open the meeting with the decision that must be made instead of beginning with updates.
Perhaps you will ask the customer what outcome they need before explaining the policy.
These changes are small enough to test.
And because the moment recurs, you do not have to wait six months for another opportunity.
The work brings the practice back to you.
Look for Proof, Not Just a Feeling of Improvement
We can also fool ourselves into thinking we are becoming better because our new approach feels more thoughtful.
That is not enough.
If you are improving delegation, what changes in the work?
Do employees return less often for routine decisions? Are their recommendations becoming stronger? Are they clearer about what belongs to them? Is the supervisor spending less time rescuing work? Are results becoming more dependable?
If you are improving meetings, do decisions happen faster? Do people leave knowing who owns what? Are fewer problems carried unnecessarily into the next meeting?
This is where From Daily Behavior to Visible Impact becomes useful. A new behavior is only the beginning. We should follow what the behavior changes in the work and, eventually, whether that movement reaches a result that matters.
Proof also keeps us humble.
You may believe the new play is better and discover that it creates another problem. Good. Now you know something you did not know before.
Mastery does not require us to be right on the first attempt.
It requires us to learn faster from the attempts we make.
Mastery Eventually Becomes Judgment
There is another danger in talking about plays, routines, and repeated practice.
People may imagine that mastery means following a script perfectly.
It does not.
A script may help a beginner because it reduces uncertainty. A delegation play may remind a new supervisor to clarify the result, boundaries, checkbacks, and ownership. A meeting structure may help a manager avoid falling into old habits.
But situations vary.
One employee needs more direction because the assignment is new. Another already has strong judgment and only needs clarity about the result. One customer needs a detailed explanation. Another wants a fast decision. One team needs the leader to step in. Another needs the leader to get out of the way.
Practice develops the ability to see those differences.
The play provides structure.
The repetitions provide experience.
Feedback helps you notice patterns.
Reflection helps you make sense of them.
Eventually, you are not merely remembering what the play says.
You are developing judgment about when to use it, when to adapt it, and when the situation requires another response entirely.
That is much closer to mastery.
Leadership Training Should Create Repetitions, Not Just Coverage
This way of thinking has also changed how I look at leadership development.
Leadership programs can easily become competitions to cover more content. A one-day program introduces eight concepts. A two-day program introduces sixteen. Participants leave with full notebooks and perhaps a hundred slides.
But mastery does not come from seeing more concepts.
People need opportunities to practise important responses.
That is why our approach to leadership training in the Philippines increasingly uses real workplace situations as the practice field. Participants work with the kinds of moments they actually face: returned work, unclear expectations, difficult checkbacks, slow decisions, customer escalations, meetings without ownership, and employees who need different levels of direction.
They try a play.
They see what happens.
They receive feedback.
They adjust.
Then they get another rep.
A longer program is useful not simply because we can put more topics into it. It gives people more room to practise, integrate, receive feedback, and make a better next attempt.
That is where much of the learning lives.
Do Not Merely Grow Older in the Work
When I think again about tumatanda na walang pinagkatandaan, I realize the expression is not really about age.
It is about wasted experience.
Something happened, but nothing was learned from it.
The same meeting happens again. The same mistake appears. The same employee returns the same problem. The same customer complaint surprises the organization for the fifth time.
The years accumulate.
But the next move does not improve.
We can choose another way.
The meeting that went badly can teach us how to open the next one. The failed delegation can reveal what the employee needed to hear. The customer complaint can expose a broken handoff. The successful conversation can show us a response worth repeating. A mistake can become evidence instead of merely becoming regret.
You do not have to leave the workplace to find opportunities to practise your craft.
Much of the practice you need is already arriving at your desk, entering your meeting, calling your phone, returning an assignment, questioning your decision, and asking you what happens next.
Experience gives you the rep.
Reflection helps you learn from it.
Evidence tells you whether the change worked.
Then the next rep gives you another chance.
You do not need 10,000 hours of repeating what you already do. And you do not need to prove that you became exactly one percent better today.
You need to make sure that the next repetition is not merely another copy of the last one.
Do not merely grow older in the work. Grow wiser because of the work.
