Three decades of being in a corporate role is generally considered a long and substantial amount of experience to have.

In a three decade working period, the amount of time spent being in a corporate role is about 25 percent of the amount of time spent being alive.

This means three decades of being alive is structurally four times longer (and infinitely more substantial) than three decades of playing a corporate role.

Still, three decades of being alive is not considered by many as a long and substantial experience to have.

This is because for most people, being in a corporate role requires their presence, their attention, their active participation, intentionality and understanding of what they are up to. Otherwise there are immediate and obvious consequences.

Most people don’t realize that life at large is also designed the same way. Because there is no immediate boss evaluating our personal existence, we allow ourselves to sleepwalk through it. We withhold our presence, use our attention haphazardly, and prematurely suspend inquiry into understanding what we are up to with being alive in the first place.

If we applied the same rigor to simply being alive as we do to our ‘high-stakes deliverables’, we would realize that life experience is infinitely longer and substantially more valuable than its corresponding corporate experience.

I have completed three decades of being alive this week. This is substantial life experience. I know this because I am not sleepwalking through it.

There are two simultaneous truths that need to be understood:

You can judge if the entire pot of rice is cooked just by checking one grain of rice.

You can’t judge a book just by checking the number of pages in the book.

Life is a phenomenon that follows both these truths at different levels.

At one level, life is the essence – an energy expressing itself into form, through everything including us. We are quite literally of the universe, and sprouting inside the universe as self-aware beings.

I’m reminded of Khalil Gibran’s words in The Prophet:

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.”

In this sense, life is the collective impersonal phenomenon of which we all are a part, and of which we partake.

At another level, life is also the circumstantial unfolding of the events – the narrative of one’s personal existence.

Wisdom is in the ability to discern between these two aspects of life.

When we lack wisdom, we confuse the two. We dismiss maturity simply because it hasn’t existed for a long time. And we innocently conflate a long existence with being mature.

In the coaching industry, I sometimes hear colleagues highlight the value of having ‘gray hair’ to be taken seriously. People unconsciously project their own maturity (or lack thereof) when they were younger, onto other people, and assume that maturity is a function of age.

Fact is, most of the leaders I work with have gray – or soon to be gray – hair. I don’t.

Grey hair is a proxy. Needless to say, proxies can be gamed. It is a revealing illusion: I know of coach practitioners in their 40’s allegedly dyeing their hair gray to be taken seriously for executive coaching engagements.

If we look back historically, across the world, we have not given much importance to accumulation of decades. Age was not a variable of consideration.

When Albert Einstein published the Annus mirabilis papers that significantly altered humanity’s understanding of space, time, and the physical universe, he had not yet reached his thirtieth birthday.

Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three, when he was entrusted with the responsibility of drafting the United States Declaration of Independence, articulating a sovereign philosophy of human rights that would govern a new nation.

Swami Vivekananda stood at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago and shifted the spiritual axis of the Western world when he was exactly thirty years old.

When Jesus of Nazareth began a public ministry that, in a span of just three years, would rewrite the moral and structural foundation of Western civilization, he was just about thirty years old.

When Martin Luther King Jr. stood as the leader of a revolution, holding his ground against centuries of systemic oppression, he was exactly thirty.

When Baruch Spinoza laid the intellectual foundations for his magnum opus, Ethics – the rigorous logical framework that completely dismantled the religious dogma of his era and reshaped Western philosophy – he was exactly thirty years old.

Adi Shankara traversed the length and breadth of India, debated the greatest scholars of his time, and authored the definitive commentaries on Advaita Vedanta, before his passing at thirty-two.

We do not care about their age, only their impact. Their authority was undeniable, and the world has benefitted from them because their presence was absolute. The pot of rice was cooked. They did not merely survive for three decades; they applied rigorous, active intentionality to their existence.

What they had was demonstrated competence. What age pretends to offer is assumed competence. I say pretends because assumed competence is a psychological trick that impresses only those who do not exercise critical thinking.

This is called Ageism – which is a form of prejudice and discrimination against people based on their age. And many don’t realize that this cuts both ways: We allow ourselves to wait for our biological age to grant us an authority our internal state has not earned. And we confuse the accumulation of time with the accumulation of wisdom. So we endeavor to accumulate time, instead of waking up to wisdom.

The point is rather obvious: wisdom, maturity, depth and impact have little to do with age. They are independent variables. ‘Experience’ in its essence is not a function of the calendar. It is a function of presence.

This means, it is never too early or never too late to tap into wisdom, maturity, depth and impact. You just have to want to wake up more than you want to sleepwalk.

To anyone evaluating their own life, or the capacity of those around them, I recommend developing the discernment of wisdom: Do not look at the page number. Check the grain of rice.