When My Face Doesn’t Tell My Age (Properly).

I was discussing a potential rebranding project with a client recently. Between the lines I could feel that the client was not taking my words seriously. Near the end of the meeting he said: "You seem to have a lot of experience. That's not easy for a recent graduate."

I lost count of how many times I had to verbally, explicitly confirm that I am over 40 years old, with almost 20 years of professional experience. My face simply lies about my age, and I can't do anything about that (except for once I tried to dye my hair to white…).

In cultures where seniority and experience speak a ton, my "facial age" is not very helpful. When I was still young, I indeed have the excuse—the fact that I am junior and inexperienced. In my first job at BCG, I never had to worry about "not looking old enough" because my clients knew I am an undergraduate hire there mostly to take notes, run the numbers and build the decks. As I moved on, I can still live with "a naïve face" to excuse for some mistakes.

But as my experiences grow—5 years, 10 years, 15 years, that excuse no longer works. I had to spend more time convincing others that I do know the trade, that my advice is well thought out, that I have built brands from scratch. Time of "proofing" could have been better used to discuss other more substantial work. However, there often am I, going through a long credential deck and trying as hard to succinctly show what I have done before.

When I started my first venture in college, my professor suggested that a "grey hair" sit next to me in important meetings—without saying anything, that person "adds weight". 20 years later, I am supposed to qualify for that "grey hair". Funny enough, I still at times need a "grey hair" partner.

But something has been shifting.

There are a number of prominent "30 Under 30" lists (and I wonder if there soon will be "20 under 20" or "10 under 10"). 26-year-olds running eight-figure companies. 24-year-olds advising boards twice their age. Nobody was asking them to prove they'd "put in the years." The years weren't the point. The output was.

And it hit me: the whole premise I've been fighting might already be quietly dying, at least in the parts of the business world I actually work in. Not everywhere, not all at once. But the idea that expertise has to be aged like wine, that you need two decades before anyone takes your sentence seriously, is losing ground fast.

Which makes me wonder if I've been solving the wrong problem. I kept trying to prove I wasn't young. Maybe the better move is to stop caring whether people think I am.

Here's the thing about (part of) my entrepreneurial and consulting work. Branding moves fast enough that half of what I learned in my first ten years is now actively wrong, some of it already expired. So when a client reads my face as "junior," they're not entirely wrong about what that face is carrying. I'm not dragging around twenty years of "dead weight". I'm dragging around maybe twelve years of useful pattern-recognition and eight years of stuff I've had to consciously unlearn.

I think about my professor's advice differently now. I've started to wonder if the room needs the opposite signal sometimes. Someone who looks like they haven't been trained to say no yet, someone whose face doesn't come pre-loaded with "that won't work, we tried it in 2015." A grey hair says: trust the caution. A young face says, unfairly or not: trust the imagination.

I started doing this in my own pitches lately, reaching for a framework I've used successfully for a decade, then deliberately putting it back down and trying something I'm not sure will hold. That's not something my 20-years-experienced self would have done 10 years ago. It's closer to what my face has always suggested about me, whether I liked it or not.

So no, I'm not going to dye my hair white again. I've stopped needing people to believe I'm 40-something with two decades behind me. If anything, I've started treating the mistaken assumption as useful information—a small, unearned nudge toward staying young at heart, not just young in the mirror.