Mastery Through Experience: What Technology Keeps Teaching Us About Being Human

Monday, 19 January 2026

One of the most important things I’ve had to relearn in recent years is that mastery doesn’t come from instruction alone; it comes from experience.

I think about this often when I remember my high school photography class. We were being taught how to manage exposure when photographing against a fully white background. Snow scenes, bright light, and reflective surfaces are all situations where a camera can easily misread what it’s seeing.

The solution is a grey card calibrated to perfect mid-tone light, used as a reference point. You test your exposure against the card, adjust accordingly, and then take the photograph knowing the image won’t be over- or under-exposed.

The theory made sense, but as a teenager, theory alone wasn’t enough. I had my own DSLR camera and sat in front of the classroom whiteboard, grey card in hand, adjusting the exposure and testing the outcome myself. That simple click of my camera and moment of experimentation earned me a public reprimand from our teacher.

That moment has stayed with me, not because of the discipline itself, but because it highlighted something fundamental about how people actually learn, especially when technology is involved. Being told how something works is not the same as understanding it. For many of us, knowledge doesn’t settle until it has passed through our hands.

This matters far beyond photography.

During a webinar I once hosted on artificial intelligence and education, one of the speakers, an award-winning futurist and educator, described learning as a process of getting lost. Of meandering, experimenting, and discovering systems not by following instructions, but by engaging with them directly.

If we rely solely on Google Maps, we arrive faster, but we understand and experience less.

This is where technology begins to create tension. We optimise for efficiency, often at the expense of depth, and we prioritise speed over comprehension, automation over intimacy with the tools we use.

As an anthropologist working in emerging technology, I’ve seen this pattern repeat again and again. It’s also an ethical tension I feel personally, with the pursuit of technological expansion alongside the pursuit of experience. The challenge is not choosing one over the other, but learning how to hold both.

Founders build remarkable systems. Platforms launch, and products go live. Yet there is always a moment when control must be released. The idea leaves its creator and becomes something shaped by users, interpretation, resistance, or misunderstanding.

That moment of surrender is part of every transformational process.

Building something is only half the work. The rest happens when it takes its first breath in the world, and it is adopted, rejected, repurposed, or simply ignored. Some ideas succeed, some remain dormant. Others never have the opportunity to evolve because they are held too tightly.

This applies not only to technology, but to the identity of the founder as well.

For a long time, I struggled to describe myself without referencing technology. It became inseparable from my work, my relevance, and my sense of value. But as systems grow more capable of synthesis, prediction, and expansion, the human behind them must evolve too. Otherwise, we risk outsourcing not just labour, but authorship, and eventually agency over our own lives.

Over the past year, I’ve noticed a shift across the technology landscape. Many organisations are beginning to recognise that scale alone is not sustainable. Older ambitions of growth at all costs, automation without reflection, intelligence without wisdom, no longer hold in the same way they once did.

This doesn’t require abandoning technology, but more about re-anchoring it into something more sustainable and something that allows space for human evolution alongside technical progress.

Structures must support longevity, not just momentum, and leadership must evolve from authority by position to responsibility by choice. And experimentation needs room to breathe, to emerge, and to mature in its own time.

The most effective founders and teams I work with aren’t chasing what looks impressive. They are building what can last, and the systems that reflect not only technical capability, but what being human is meant to feel like within them.

They understand that real innovation often emerges through refinement, boundaries, and a deeper relationship with responsibility, both personal and collective.

Technology will continue to evolve rapidly. That is inevitable. But what remains optional is whether we evolve with it. Mastery, as it turns out, isn’t about control. It’s about commitment after experience and choosing structures that support who we’ve become, not who we were trying to prove ourselves to be, or who we were told we had to be.

Sometimes progress isn’t marked by acceleration, but by alignment. And often, the most powerful turning points rarely announce themselves. They appear in your life, and it’s up to you to take the chance.

Best,
Alison Mackie
Founder, RHC