Do you feel like you’re constantly treading water at work? Or that if you could just get on top of the workload, things would smooth out and they would feel a lot more in control. Does it seem like certain projects drag on for ages, or that you’re constantly tinkering?

This is a completely normal phenomenon, and something that most people experience. The frustration is rooted in a shift from rote education to experiential learning--from mastering content to learning by doing. For people accustomed to excelling at school by learning the information and applying it on a test, this can be a really jarring change.

In most formal education, there is a specific set of content to be mastered, with a curriculum outlining in what order everything must be learned and how all of the pieces connect together. Your syllabus structures the information into discrete chunks--master this content and you progress to the next level, rinse, repeat, until suddenly you’re walking across the stage on a sweltering day in May collecting the most expensive piece of paper you’ll ever buy in your life. Boom. You mastered the material, and you have the diploma to prove it.

Then you get a job and you start to feel like maybe you’re in a bit over your head. You feel like you’re just trying to keep up and you’re just trying to see what works. You feel frustrated because you don’t know why you can’t just figure it out already, and that frustration erodes at your confidence. You may have symptoms of Imposter Syndrome--of feeling like a fraud or like you have no idea what you’re doing.

The challenge is that in a work setting, we learn by doing, when most of us have only ever experienced learning by mastering material. You feel frustrated because experiential learning is iterative--and on the surface feels inefficient.

You have an idea, you test it out, you make an assessment based on the results, and you make adjustments for next time. You’re constantly tinkering and observing what worked and what didn’t work.

You’ve been doing this naturally for your entire life--you touch a hot pot, you burn yourself, you evaluate that outcome as not ideal, and you decide to do something different next time (like use a potholder). Next time, potholder in hand, you reassess your experience and determine that that “experiment” had a better outcome. Now you have a process that meets your goals, plus extra information you can apply to a different setting (such as touching something hot outside the kitchen). This is how we learn. It can be summed up in a cool model called the Experiential Learning cycle, which looks like this:

In a work setting, this can look like doing a big presentation for a client and then afterward, implementing new tracking systems so that you don’t have to scramble so much to get the data together before the next presentation. We see the same steps here--doing something (giving a presentation), making an assessment (it was a giant pain to pull all of that data together at the last minute), developing a hypothesis (maybe ongoing data collection would make reporting easier), and then implementing. The process continues--you reflect after the next presentation that indeed, collecting the data was helpful, but now you have a new idea--what if you automated the data reporting instead of relying on staff to submit info? You see how that goes for the next presentation, then you keep tinkering.

People sometimes get frustrated with the process and wonder why they couldn’t have just figured out how to do it “the right way” the first time. This is often connected to feelings of Imposter Syndrome--”If I actually knew what I was doing, I would have been able to figure this out in the first place instead of having to constantly tweak the process.” They see the iterative process as a failure, or at the very least, inefficient.

In reality--the opposite is true. In fact it’s the process of testing and assessing that makes the most dramatic improvements. Each cycle gets you closer to the desired end result, but more importantly, it uncovers improvements you likely could not have anticipated at the outset. The key component is being willing to embrace the idea that most things are “better done than perfect” and being willing to test things out rather than either waiting until it’s perfect or beating yourself up over needing to improve something the next time.

This shift in mindset takes practice. Fittingly, you can’t expect to master learning from experience overnight. Instead, one good first step is to identify a project you’ve been iterating on, and try mapping it to the experiential learning cycle. Here’s the model again:

Can you retrace your steps and see how you’ve tested different approaches and learned from experience? Can you map what you’ve done to the experimentation, reflection, and assessment phases? Does this help you reframe your frustrations?

Iteration doesn’t mean you failed the first time--it’s evidence that you have the capacity to learn from experience and shift your approach. If you’re struggling with feelings of Imposter Syndrome, this mindset shift can dramatically improve your confidence and help you to see iteration not as a sign you don’t know what you’re doing, but rather as evidence of your ability to grow and improve, two qualities nearly every employer is looking for.

In Praise of Tinkering