CherryCoBiz has become a living collection of questions, reflections, stories, and observations gathered from whatever season of life I happen to be standing in. Today’s prompt gave me one that felt surprisingly difficult to answer.

What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?

At fifty years old, I suppose I’m finally old enough to answer that question.

The funny thing is, my answer isn’t what it would have been twenty years ago.

Back then, I probably would have said work hard.

Or be disciplined.

Or don’t quit when things get difficult.

Those things matter.

But today, I think my answer is different.

Stay thoughtful.

The world is full of people eager to be heard.

What we seem to have less of are people willing to listen.

And I don’t mean agreeing with everyone.

I mean genuinely listening long enough to understand why another person thinks the way they do.

Because thoughtful people can do that.

They can sit with an idea without immediately accepting it or rejecting it.

They can be curious.

They can be challenged.

They can learn.

Most importantly, they can recognize that wisdom is not distributed according to age, titles, income, credentials, or position.

We all stand in different knowledge.

The older I get, the more important that truth becomes.

When I was growing up, I often heard people dismiss younger leaders simply because they were young. If a supervisor, manager, or business owner happened to be younger than the people working beneath them, there was often a subtle resentment attached to it.

As though age itself should determine authority.

As though birthdays automatically create wisdom.

At the time, I didn’t have language for what I was seeing.

Now I do.

It was never really about leadership.

It was about assumptions.

The assumption that older automatically means wiser.

The assumption that younger automatically means inexperienced.

The assumption that authority and insight are the same thing.

Life has taught me otherwise.

Some older people are incredibly wise.

Some aren’t.

Some younger people possess remarkable insight.

Some don’t.

Most of us are simply carrying different experiences, different strengths, different blind spots, and different pieces of the puzzle.

The advice I would give someone younger today is actually the same lesson younger people have taught me.

Stay thoughtful enough to keep listening.

Don’t become the person who dismisses an idea because of where it came from.

Don’t assume someone older knows more simply because they are older.

Don’t assume someone younger knows less simply because they are younger.

Listen first.

Then think.

My own children have reminded me of this more times than I can count.

Sometimes the lesson has been profound.

Sometimes it has involved discovering that one of my children views decorative stickers with the same suspicion most people reserve for pyramid schemes.

Either way, the lesson is usually the same.

People experience the world differently than we do.

And if we’re paying attention, there is almost always something to learn.

That lesson has followed me throughout my career as well.

If you’ve read The Lawyer, The Nurse, The Soldier: How My Almosts Became My Purpose or The Tapestry of Work, you know my professional life has rarely followed a straight line. Healthcare, research, psychology, real estate, customer service, writing, and most recently the legal field have all shaped the person I became.

For the past several months, I’ve worked in a law office.

It’s a place filled with talented people, deep expertise, and a structure that has served it well for decades.

Next year, the firm will celebrate fifty years in business. That deserves respect.

But working there has also reinforced something I’ve come to believe about every organization, every family, every community, and every institution.

The person at the top sees certain things.

The person in the middle sees different things.

The newest employee sees things everyone else stopped noticing years ago.

The person answering the phones often understands realities that never make it into the boardroom.

Everyone brings a different perspective to the table.

And thoughtful people understand that no single perspective is complete.

That brings me to the part I keep turning over.

My time in this role is ending.

I gave my notice last week, and after my final days here, I will be stepping into something new. I am not ready to tell the full story of that next chapter just yet, but I can say this much: it is a role with more responsibility, better pay, room to grow, and a path that makes sense for where my life is headed now.

I will also be working under someone significantly younger than me.

And honestly, I love that.

Not in a polite, forced, trying-to-prove-a-point way.

I mean it.

I am impressed by what he has built. I respect the direction he is moving in. I see intelligence, drive, vision, and opportunity. I see someone young who has positioned himself well, and instead of feeling threatened by that, I feel inspired by it.

That is the part I keep thinking about.

When I was younger, I heard people make younger leadership sound like an insult.

At fifty, I see it differently.

I see possibility.

I see change.

I see the future doing what the future does — arriving through people who may not look like the version of authority we were taught to expect.

And maybe that is why this writing prompt landed where it did.

The best advice I would give someone younger than me is not only advice for them.

It is advice for me too.

Stay thoughtful.

Keep listening.

Do not confuse age with wisdom.

Do not confuse titles with intelligence.

Do not confuse familiarity with truth.

There are lessons in our elders, yes.

There are lessons in our children too.

There are lessons in the people beside us, beneath us, above us, behind us, and ahead of us.

Some of you may remember The Message in the Square, where a meditation vision showed me a layered pattern of structure, grounding, and change. Later, in The Paradox of the Fixed Frame, I wrote about how a steady structure can hold space for inner growth.

For a while, that was exactly what this season did.

The frame held.

I changed inside it.

But sometimes growth asks for more than inner movement.

Sometimes the frame itself has to change.

That does not make the old frame meaningless.

It means it served its season.

And now, I am walking into the next one with more gratitude than resentment, more curiosity than certainty, and more willingness than ever to learn from whoever has something real to teach me.

Maybe that is the real advice.

Do not harden too early.

Do not become so attached to what you think you know that you stop noticing what life is trying to show you.

Listen first.

Then think.

Because wisdom is not a reward for surviving more birthdays.

Wisdom belongs to the people who keep listening.

Yours in curiosity, growth, and lifelong learning,

Terra Turner