Let me tell you about something I didn’t recognize in myself for years.
I spent decades building a career I was proud of. Titles. Responsibility. Influence. Results. I worked hard, solved hard problems, led teams, navigated politics, managed crises. Like most of you, I assumed that was the value.
Then one day, the structure shifted.
The title changed. The org chart moved. The formal authority dissolved. And I had this quiet, unsettling thought:
If I’m not in that role anymore… where does my value live?
That’s when I realized something that changed everything.
“You have decades of compounded wisdom sitting in an account you didn’t know existed.”
I call it the Wisdom Dividend.
Not your 401k.
Not your LinkedIn network.
Not your accumulated credentials.
Your judgment.
Your pattern recognition.
Your context sense.
The calm you bring into a messy room because you’ve seen this movie before.
The Day It Clicked for Me
Years ago, I worked on knowledge retention at John Deere. We were studying power plant refurbishments. Those projects happen every 10-20 years. Most professionals see one in a lifetime. Maybe.
The ones who had been through three?
They were different.
They didn’t just know procedures. They recognized the subtle warning signs. They remembered the “exception year” when the standard approach failed. They could predict where friction would show up before anyone else saw it.
You cannot Google that kind of wisdom.
That was my lightbulb moment.
Experience compounds.
Not in a linear way. In an exponential way.
The gap between someone at 35 and someone at 65 isn’t 30 years of knowledge. It’s 30 years of compounded judgment.
And yet culturally, we’re told that after a certain age, we start declining in value.
That narrative is economically illiterate.
Founders over 50 have more than twice the success rate of founders in their thirties. Ventures started by people our age succeed at dramatically higher rates. The Wisdom Dividend- A Manifesto
Experience doesn’t depreciate.
It compounds.
The Invisible Asset Problem
Here’s the tragedy.
Most of us never learned how to collect the dividend.
We invested forty years. Attention. Effort. Mistakes. Recoveries. Relationships. Hard decisions.
Then when we left a role, no one handed us the withdrawal slip.
We sit on appreciating capital, and the world subtly tells us to wind down.
But here’s the truth:
You don’t age out of an appreciating asset.
You age into peak performance.
The real question is not whether you have wisdom worth investing.
The question is:
Are you collecting your dividend, or letting it sit dormant?
In Part 2, I’ll walk through why this isn’t just poetic language. It’s an economic framework. And how reinvention becomes the activation mechanism.
The compounding is just beginning.
