A veteran warns newcomers that experience builds speed and confidence, but can also make you careless. The best technicians stay alert on every job, even familiar ones, and keep questioning instead of coasting on what they think they know.
If you're new to the trades, here's something nobody tells you about experience. Experience builds pattern recognition, and that's a good thing. It makes you faster, it makes you more efficient, it builds confidence. And honestly, most of what we do is a matter of repetition. Do it enough times and you start to feel like you're pretty good at it. It can also make you blind though, because when we've seen something 100 times, our brains start assuming. We stop observing, we stop listening, and we can stop questioning. We start settling for good enough, and that's when mistakes happen. Great technicians use experience as a guide, not a shortcut. They still pay attention. They trust their instincts. They still verify. They stay present because every job deserves your full awareness, even if you think you've seen it before.
