So, you’re in your 40s and you work in technology.
Congratulations.
Now the fun begins.
You’ve probably been doing this for 15 or 20 years. Maybe longer. You’ve lived through technologies that were going to change everything—and some actually did. You’ve watched others disappear almost as quickly as they arrived.
You’ve changed platforms. Operating systems. Jobs. Maybe careers.
You’ve made great decisions.
You’ve made terrible ones.
Good.
You needed both.
Because somewhere along the way, while you were busy building a career and living your life, something else happened:
You accumulated experience.
And experience is a strange asset. Nobody hands it to you. You can’t download it. You can’t prompt it.
Harvard doesn’t teach it.
There is no Experience 101.
You have to earn that one the slow way.
What a ride
If you’ve spent your career in technology, perhaps it has taken you places you never expected.
It certainly did for me.
Singapore. Hong Kong. Amsterdam. London. Barcelona. Italy. Vienna. New York. California.
And a few places—and stories—I’ll save for another day.
There was a Ferrari in Vienna once. A Lamborghini in California.
There were also endless airports, concerts, comedy clubs, Irish pubs, parties that somehow turned into mornings—and mornings that required a shower, a suit, a couple of espressos and a pitch to somebody who had absolutely no reason to know what you’d been doing six hours earlier.
I don’t necessarily recommend this as a productivity methodology.
But it was fun.
Still is.
There isn’t some imaginary line where one version of life ends and another begins. You keep going. You keep working. Learning. Traveling. Building. Meeting people. Going out until whatever hour works for you.
Except now you’re carrying something you didn’t have when the adventure started:
experience.
One night I found myself standing in Times Square at two or three in the morning, looking for a pharmacy to pick up some last provisions, when I made what I considered an important discovery:
The city that never sleeps does, in fact, sleep.
I posted this revelation on Facebook.
Someone replied:
“José, go to sleep.”
Fair enough.
Somewhere between Hong Kong and Singapore
I once boarded a flight in Hong Kong with a brochure that needed to be finished.
And yes, I mean an actual paper brochure.
Ten or twelve pages. Double-sided. Full color.
Very sophisticated stuff. Seriously.
Print production was—and is—a craft. There was no logging into the website tomorrow morning and quietly fixing a typo. Once thousands of copies came off that press, your mistake was going to have a very long and expensive life.
By the time we landed in Singapore, mine was print-ready.
That’s something I remember fondly about those years: work and life weren’t always opposing forces.
Sometimes the work was part of the adventure.
People have asked me how I tolerated flights like Los Angeles to Hong Kong.
Tolerated them?
I loved them.
Put me inside a metal tube at 35,000 feet, traveling 550 miles an hour, give me a laptop and a movie in the background, and I’m perfectly happy. Some of my best ideas, proposals and presentations have been born somewhere over an ocean.
And occasionally the person next to me would start talking.
I’d close the laptop.
“Hey. What’s up?”
Some of those conversations lasted an hour. Others lasted most of the flight.
A few of those strangers became friends for years.
Technology gave me a career.
But the career gave me a life.
And if you’ve been doing this for a while, you probably have your own version of these stories.
Now look at what you’re carrying
Early in your career, perhaps you understood technology.
Now you understand technology in context.
You know the newest solution isn’t necessarily the right one. You’ve watched companies spend fortunes solving problems they didn’t actually have. You’ve learned that people matter as much as platforms.
And you’ve probably developed that strange ability to sit in a meeting, listen to a problem for ten minutes and think:
I’ve seen this movie before.
That’s not baggage.
That’s pattern recognition.
And you earned it.
Which makes what’s happening right now particularly interesting.
And then AI showed up
Perfect.
Another revolution.
We’ve been here before.
Different technology. Same sensation.
Everyone is trying to determine what’s real, what’s hype, what disappears and what changes everything.
Someone beginning a technology career today has extraordinary tools.
So do we.
Except we get to combine those tools with everything we’ve already learned.
AI can give you an answer in seconds.
Experience helps you recognize whether the answer makes any damn sense.
That’s leverage.
And this isn’t about competing with the next generation.
I’d rather work with them.
Their knowledge plus ours. Their perspective plus ours. New tools plus accumulated judgment.
That sounds considerably more interesting.
Meanwhile, right now…
I’m writing this on a Friday night.
And while writing it, I’ve been switching between The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Shark Tank and the Ivy League season opener—Harvard at Brown.
Laptop open. Television on. Writing something about technology and experience while occasionally wondering what Mark Cuban thinks of somebody’s valuation.
Apparently this is what serious professional reflection looks like around here.
And that’s sort of the point.
There’s no correct way to be in your 40s.
Or your 50s.
Or, for that matter, your 70s.
You don’t graduate from one version of yourself and receive instructions for the next one.
You just keep going.
Hopefully a little smarter.
Definitely more experienced.
And, if you’re doing it right, still curious.
Now the fun begins
You’ve succeeded. You’ve screwed up. You’ve built things, broken things and fixed things. You’ve met extraordinary people and probably a few you’d be perfectly happy never seeing again.
Hopefully you’ve collected some great stories along the way.
You’re not starting over.
You’re starting from here.
With every lesson, relationship, mistake, instinct and bit of judgment you’ve accumulated.
Harvard doesn’t teach that.
There is no Experience 101.
You already took the course.
So put all of it in your pocket.
Use it.
And keep going.
Because if you’re in your 40s and you work in technology, you’re not arriving late to anything.
You’re arriving armed to the teeth.
Now the fun begins.
— JT
José Tulla provides executive and proxy advisory services and has worked in technology and digital business for more than 25 years. He is based in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Published September 25, 2026 · 11:49 p.m. AST
