I’ve been thinking about something strange that happens with experience.
Get really good at something and eventually you stop knowing exactly how you know what you know.
You see a situation and something bothers you.
Someone presents an opportunity and you’re interested before everyone else is.
A plan looks perfectly reasonable on paper and you say, “Nope. Something’s wrong here.”
Then somebody asks why.
“I don’t know. I’ve just been doing this a long time.”
I hear versions of that all the time.
I’ve said it myself.
But there is a reason.
There are probably hundreds of them.
We’ve just forgotten most of what they were.
Experience gets compressed
Thirty years of doing anything creates a ridiculous amount of source material.
People. Mistakes. Conversations. Risks. Wins. Embarrassments. Things you believed that turned out to be wrong. Advice you ignored. Advice you didn’t.
Most of it felt pretty ordinary while it was happening.
You weren’t standing there thinking:
I should remember this Tuesday afternoon. It’s going to influence how I make decisions in 17 years.
You were just living your life.
But some of it stuck.
The story eventually faded while the lesson remained.
Do that enough times and we give the result names like experience, instinct or judgment.
I think judgment is often history with most of the footnotes missing.
We’re really good at recording the WHAT
Look at almost any accomplished person online and you can usually figure out what they became.
President.
Dealer Principal.
Surgeon.
Lawyer.
Founder.
Thirty years in the business. Built a company. Sold another one. Won some awards.
Useful information.
It’s also information tens of thousands of other people possess.
The interesting part is everything underneath it.
Maybe a terrible boss twenty years ago explains how you lead people today.
Maybe losing a huge customer created a rule you’ve followed ever since.
That’s enough.
Your brain is probably already supplying examples from your own life.
That’s the stuff I’m interested in.
The WHO, WHEN, WHY and HOW behind the WHAT.
Who shaped the way you think?
When did something happen that permanently changed it?
Why do you believe certain things so strongly today?
How did all of that eventually become the person making decisions now?
Those questions are harder than they look.
I keep seeing this happen
I’ll be talking with someone who is exceptionally good at what they do and they’ll say something with absolute certainty.
I ask why. “Tell me a little more about that”
The first answer is usually pretty polished.
So I stay there a little longer.
Eventually we hit something.
A person.
An old job.
A failure.
A conversation they haven’t thought about in years.
And suddenly you can almost watch the connection happen.
Oh shit. That’s where that came from.
Now we’re somewhere useful.
The belief has an origin.
This changed how I think about Polaris
When I originally developed the Polaris Method™, I thought primarily about identity extraction.
How do you get underneath the résumé, professional bio and polished version of somebody and establish what is actually there?
I still think that's important.
But doing the work revealed another problem.
Retrieval.
Polaris begins with approximately 70 questions.
That probably sounds like I really enjoy questionnaires.
I don’t.
The questions are retrieval devices.
A good question brings back a memory. That memory connects to something else. Sometimes a person suddenly remembers an event they haven’t thought about in twenty years and realizes it explains something they still do today.
That’s the gold.
We aren't trying to manufacture an interesting story around somebody.
We’re trying to recover the source material that actually produced them.
And there’s a clock on some of it.
People forget
Names disappear.
Dates blur.
Two separate events become one story.
The little details go first.
Eventually you can still remember what you learned without being able to reconstruct exactly how you learned it.
That matters for reasons that have nothing to do with AI.
It matters if you want to write a book someday.
Teach someone.
Explain your methods.
Build something around your ideas.
Leave something useful for your children.
Or simply understand your own life a little better.
AI has added another reason I care about it.
We’re spending enormous energy trying to make people and businesses easier for machines to discover and understand.
Fine.
I work on that problem too.
But there’s a question upstream of all of it…
Understand what?
We can optimize the representation later.
First I want the source.
Your résumé recorded the milestones
It probably did a decent job too.
Dates. Titles. Companies. Accomplishments.
But it didn't record the Tuesday afternoon in ‘92 that changed your life
It didn't capture the sentence somebody said to you that you never forgot.
It doesn't explain the scar tissue behind one of your strongest principles.
And it certainly doesn't contain the thousands of tiny experiences that eventually became your judgment.
Most of that is still sitting in the only place it ever existed.
You.
So maybe spend some time going backward.
Think about the people who shaped you. The moments when your thinking changed. The reasons you do things differently now.
Don’t worry about whether any of it belongs on LinkedIn.
Most of it probably doesn’t.
Just see what you can retrieve.
You spent decades becoming whatever you are today.
The WHAT is already easy to find.
I'm interested in the WHO, WHEN, WHY and HOW that made it true.
Capture some of that while the source is still available.
— Bob
Polaris was built to do exactly this: capture and resolve the experience, judgment, ideas and source material behind the reputation you've already built.
Bob
About Bob Manor
Bob Manor is the founder of South Ontario Auto Remarketing , Can-Am Dealer Services , and co-founder of Auto Auction Review . He’s also the creator of Influence.vin , a branding and communication studio built for the car business. With over 30 years in the automotive world, Bob specializes in wholesale, dealer services, and identity-driven brand strategy. He’s a regular contributor to well-known automotive publications and uses his platforms to help industry pros re-align with who they are, not just what they do.
Disclaimer:
These are my own observations and interpretations, based on lived experience inside this industry.
This is not financial, legal, or professional advice ... it is pattern recognition, shared for awareness and strategic consideration only
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