It’s not clear to me how common this is in human endeavors.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
The same is true about learning anything else. Personally, when I've been first starting programming, I learned a lot of useful programming techniques by stealing bits and pieces from videogames and demos whose source was available and incorporating them into my own attempts at writing a game engine.
He's pretty clearly talking about creative work here, where the goal is to make new things. Whereas the goal of most of medicine, presumably yours included, is to reliably do a known thing. If I'm going to have surgery, I'm going to find a surgeon who has done the procedure a large number of times, because there's a clear expected outcome, and a deviation from that likely means failure.
A useful tool here might be the Cynefin framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework
You're talking about work that's mostly in the Obvious and Complicated buckets. He's talking about work in the Complex and Chaotic domains.
Isn't it a tautology then? If the goal is to make something you haven't before, then obviously it's accomplished the first time round, by definition.
And in a broader sense, is it really true? Are debuts usually the best art pieces?
I suspect you already understand that novelty is not the only goal of creative work, so I'm just going to go on past your first bit. Let me know if you truly don't get it.
He didn't say that debuts are usually the best art pieces. One, you have the flow wrong. He's more saying that the best art pieces were debuts. But two, he's not saying that either, because "things" is broader than art, and "best" is different than "really amazing".
As an example, look at Hamilton. I'd call it both amazing and great. But it wasn't done by somebody with decades of training and experience. Miranda started work on it when he was 28. It was not his 10th or 20th rap-influenced historical musical. It was his first. And only his second produced musical period.
The good thing about experience is that it gives us habits that work quite well. But that's also the bad thing, because it's very hard to approach the top fresh, to do enough things that don't work on the way to finding something novel that does work. So a lot of great creative work is done by the relatively young and inexperienced. And as Kelly says, we should give them the room to try.
It's psychologically understandable for someone who's accumulated considerable life experience to feel more nostalgic towards the freshness of being unexperienced.
"Train for skills" is much more common in other countries, although less common than it used to be. Those experienced hires didn't get to be experienced at zero cost to anyone - other employers enabled them to become experienced.
Be a good employer and do your part of the process: train for skills (so that someone else can hire those people too)
The real issue is that in many industries you don't just walk into a top job with no experience. If I'm hiring a technician, it's going to be someone with experience because in this profession they will have started as a kennel keeper, then moved up to assistant, then started doing more technical work, usually as they are in technician school, and then they will be able to work as a registered technician. Sometimes experience can be almost equivalent to having school, although there are a few things that an unlicensed/unregistered technician cannot legally do.
All that experience is much more valuable than just the book learning, and you can't make up for it with a few months training.
The approach you previously (something like "I need to get people who've already acquired the experience") is very common in the USA today, but less so in e.g. northern European countries.
The approach you explicity describe here (the existence of a training/experience pathway) is something that you currently require to exist, but seem less willing to be the provider of.
I understand that there are going to be employment situations where providing those training pathways is impossible (or almost impossible). But particularly in the USA, we've gone too far in the other direction: offloading the generation of "experienced" to other, unnamed and unidentified people and organizations, and then expecting to be able to reap what others have sown.
In order to have that person ready for the moment they were needed, I would have to have a lot of slack in a very small organization. It'd be a lot different if I were a manager at Siemens needing a new mechanical engineer.