Qualifications? I’m 45 with 35 Years of Experience

There’s a problem in this world. It’s around the perceptions of achievements and what we have achieved in life. Who sits down to write their resume starting with what you did in childhood? No-one. Who talks about important lessons they learnt about business and progress at the age of 10? Certainly not 99.99% of people.

But, everyone should frame their sphere of experience from childhood to the present day. And, business leaders would do well to include children as advisors to their businesses.

Why am I writing this article? While writing copy to represent who I am and what I believe for my new website I reviewed how I spoke about myself.

“Nikolas Badminton is a Futurist Speaker with over 20 years of experience at the bleeding edge of technology and strategic thinking.”

Why is time such an important factor in framing what we do today? Experience, I hear you say. Well, I disagree that experience is measured in years and that Adlai E. Stevenson said it well, “It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.”
I’ve been getting it wrong. We all have. And, people that ask how much experience do you have need to stop measuring it as such. So, I rewrote my reality.
“Imagine distilling 35 years of curiosity and experience across technology, culture, and change into 1 hour that changes how you, your employees, and attendees see the world completely.”
35 years? I’m 45 so everything started at 10 years old when I both read the Usborne Book of the Future, and sat at my cousin’s BBC Micro computer within a couple of months.
What followed was years of POKEing lines of code in tape-loaded computer games on my Sinclair, programming in Hex, assembly code (urgh), building database infrastructures from scratch, balking at the inertia of Windows 2.4 running on a 386 some years later, learning C, flexing power in Unix, graphic manipulation and publishing using DTP software, learning how to use a Macintosh (that was a pain in the ass after using a PC, and it was useless experience when hitting the working world), and connecting to the Internet in 1993. Then I built neural networks to learn grammar like a child, and delved into chaos theory, complexity theory, and started to realize that important things were happening with the effect of strange attractors and application of cognitive psychology.
And, if you were measuring experience from the point of graduation then all of this experience would be discounted as not counting. Sure, I did a lot more since but without those experiences I would be nothing today.
It’s just not smart to discount people’s childhood experience as valid in the scheme of who they are today. It is disrespectful to people’s efforts in this world to learn every day and change how the world works.
So, this article is a challenge to academic institutions, HR professionals, business leaders, and YOU.
Change your idea of personal value and experience. Know that you’ve been changing the world from very early in your lives. Know that even children can revolutionize the world.  Know that everyone has been building their knowledge since early in their lives.
Step back, reflect, and rewrite your history. Reset perceptions. Most importantly your own. Rewrite your bio. Tell people what you’ve achieved in life – both personally and professionally. Also, recognize that in others. The world will start to look very differently and everything will level up.
Welcome to the future.

Nikolas is a world-leading Futurist that drives leaders to take action in creating a better world for humanity. He promotes exponential thinking along with a critical, honest, and optimistic view that empowers you with knowledge to plan for today, tomorrow, and for the future.
Contact him to discuss how to engage and inspire your audience. You can also see more of Nikolas’ thoughts on his Futurist Speaker VLOGs as he publishes them in this Youtube playlist.
Please SUBSCRIBE to Nikolas’ Youtube channel so that you don’t miss any as they come up. You can see more of his thoughts on Linkedin, Twitter, and bookmarked research on Tumblr.