Another few years go by, but suddenly you're feeling like it's too late. You missed your chance. Now you're out of touch and irrelevant, and….what fresh ideas do you have, anyway? Everybody else is all cute and hip and annoyingly peppy in places like TikTok, clearly they're The Ones In Demand Now, and clearly you should just stick to what you know. So you go about your life being a boring nobody, not because you are a boring nobody, but because you made a decision, once, to wait until you were an experienced somebody.
You waited for someone else to tell you that you were good enough to do the work.
Something critical for all of us to understand about the modern passion economy, however, is that experience can't be awarded by other people, anymore. It is no longer granted, like a badge on a resume, a byproduct of time. You cannot get it by simply waiting your turn and showing up every day.
Modern experience is not an award, but an act.
It is the act of putting yourself out there, daily, challenging yourself to figure it out. It is the act of voluntarily doing the work that interests you and documenting it. It is the act of exploring new ideas and new approaches to a body of work. It is the act of creating, making, leading, trying—in public, and without promise. And it is the act of standing up and saying, “I'm good at this. I want to help. Here's how I'm going to begin. Let's do an experiment.“
What you do every day is your portfolio.
The thoughts you put out there. The initiatives you take. The projects you begin. The ideas you share. What you're doing online right now is far more important than a folder full of your past.
The key to getting taken seriously?
Is to take your work so seriously that you don't have to be given the job: you give it to yourself each and every day.
And you keep showing up.
And you keep contributing.
In the best way you know how.
Without waiting to be told you are ready. But by getting ready, by doing the work, you want to be doing.
Experience comes from experiencing, after all.
And you don't need anyone else to give you that.
Ash Ambirge
