4 Responses

1. Experience
   Iain

   The first time I heard this (something similar) was at a Tom Peters seminar a few years ago when he was barrating the ineffectiveness of middle and senior managers. He used it as an anecdote commenting that one manager had stated he had 25 years experience. TP of course questioned whether it was 25 years of experience or 1 years experience repeated 24 more times. The killer if I recall was that it was 25 years of ineffective experience !!

   Can’t be any more help than that.

   Peter

2. 100 pair of eyes
   This is perhaps an adaptation or extension of ‘100 pair of eyes’ – Marcel Proust once wrote that most tourists seem to want to travel through one hundred countries with one pair of eyes, whereas the best journey would be to travel through one country with a hundred pair of eyes.

3. Pretty much everyone has used it
   Hi Iain

   Enter “years experience” +”experience repeated” into Google and you’ll get 389 results.

   The most popular number of years seems to be 20 (although in one case it reached up to 45) and the subject matter of experience ranges from sex to mathematics to conducting interviews.

   Those credited with the phrase include Henry Ford, Brigham Young, Trevanian, ‘a wag’, Dell Brown, and a man known only as ‘Jack’.

   I’m sorry to say, Iain, that you may have to ascribe this one to Anon.

   Best regards

   Don

4. Yukiso Yamamoto
   “It has been said that a person may have ten years of experience, or one year of experience repeated ten times.”
   –Yukiso Yamamoto

   Yukiso Yamamoto Sensei, who introduced to Hawaii in 1953 the practice of Aikido, a blend of martial arts with spiritual harmony, is credited with the above quotation in several sources.

   However, as mentioned earlier, that’s only one of many possibilities.

   It’s a very handy commentary at times.