The Hubris of “In My Experience…”

The Flimsy Basis for Many Professed Insights

It’s funny how many writers, consultants, and self-proclaimed experts start an article or blog post with the words “In my experience…” and then proceed to draw broad conclusions, propose sweeping solutions, and make grandiose claims – not actually grounded in robust experience, but rather their subjective and often flawed interpretation of quite limited experience.

We’ve all been there – feeling tempted to extrapolate outwards from our own anecdotal experiences to posit some greater truth or insight about the world. But the honest reality is that individual experiences, no matter how personally profound they may feel, are just tiny data points that frequently fail to capture the true complexity of situations.

The Arrogance of Overgeneralising

It takes arrogance and hubris of the highest degree to go from “In my experience doing X at Company Y for Z years…” to purporting to have universal wisdom and definitive solutions for broad challenges faced by entire industries or domains. Our experiences are almost always fragmentary and hyper-contextual.

Even for those with commendable tenures and legitimately vast experience bases, there is still the ever-present vulnerability to countless insidious cognitive biases – from confirmation bias to the fundamental attribution error – which can dramatically skew how we perceive, rationalise, and derive meaning from our experiences.

A Little Humility Can Go a Long Way

Ultimately, true insights tend to arise not from presenting one’s personal experiences as profound revelations, but from diligently studying experiences in the aggregate, across multiple contexts, through a cogent and self-aware analytical lens.

So the next time you see some thought leader open with the classic “In my experience…” hedge, pause and ask yourself – is what follows really the product of robust, generalisable experience? Or is it more likely an overgeneralisation cloaked in claimed  authority and conviction? A little humility goes a long way.