A colleague mentioned, almost in passing, that she had worked with five hundred children. It came up as a way of explaining a shift, a no that had become a yes, a new confidence in a specific domain. Five hundred felt like a threshold crossed.

The number lands. Not because it is high or low, that depends entirely on the frame, but because it does not actually say anything.

It is a count. And counts are surprisingly poor proxies for expertise.

When researchers study how competence actually develops, they find something uncomfortable: in most fields, people reach a level that is good enough for their context fairly quickly. And then they stop improving. Not stop working, they keep accumulating hours, cases, interactions. But the quality of their competence plateaus, because what it would take to keep growing is not more repetition. It is deliberate attention to specific elements, feedback, reflection on what is actually happening. Without those, experience accumulates without deepening.

The analogy that tends to land well: driving. Someone with thirty years and three hundred thousand kilometers behind them is not necessarily a better driver than someone with five. They have driven more. That is a different thing.

Counting what you have done is not the same as tracking how you are learning.

The same person who cited five hundred children as evidence of readiness had, when working with adult groups, shown a confidence slightly misaligned with the room. Not for lack of numerical experience. For something else: a limited capacity to read the signals the group was sending, to adjust, to stay genuinely curious about what was happening rather than certain about what should be happening. The gap was not in the hours logged. It was in what those hours had been used for.

This is not a judgment. It is an example of what happens when experience becomes a number to cite rather than a process to examine.

There are at least two questions worth sitting with here.

The first is about how we evaluate others. A long list of cases, clients, or hours tells you something, but not enough. The more useful questions are about process: how does this person know when something is not working? What have they changed recently, and why? What are they still uncertain about? The answers to those questions are better signals of real expertise, and of the capacity to keep developing, than any count.

The second is about how we evaluate ourselves. It is easy to accumulate experience without growing. It is harder to deliberately work on specific aspects of what we do, to seek feedback that is actually uncomfortable, to sit with uncertainty instead of resolving it prematurely into confidence. Most professionals stop asking those questions long before they stop working.

The number five hundred is not meaningless. It suggests familiarity, exposure, some degree of calibration over time. But it can also become a way of stopping the question rather than answering it.

The more interesting version of "I have worked with five hundred children" is: "And here is what I still do not know how to do well."