Three Year Reinvention Window

Chris Anderson says, do something new every three years:

When I was at The Economist, there was a policy to rotate everyone every three years. The idea was that fresh eyes were more important than experience. “Foreign everywhere” was the mantra, and around your second year in Cairo, you could expect to get a call from the editor asking you to consider Mumbai or Sao Paolo—ideally two places you’d never been to and knew nothing about.

He describes believably the feel of each of your three years (exhilaration, competence, cynicism), and ties it nicely into Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to mastery” observation.