You should not consider a man's age but his acts. — Sophocles

You should not consider a man's age but his acts.

Author: Sophocles

Insight: We live in a world obsessed with credentials and timelines. How old are you? What school did you go to? What company have you worked at? These questions come before we ever ask what someone actually knows or what they've built. But Sophocles points at something we feel when we meet someone who acts decisively, learns constantly, and gets things done—age becomes almost irrelevant. The real insight isn't that age doesn't matter at all. It's that we've trained ourselves to use it as a shortcut for judgment, when it's often misleading. A 23-year-old who's shipped five projects and learned from real failure might deserve more trust than a 45-year-old coasting on past reputation. A new parent rethinking their career priorities might be showing more wisdom than someone "too old to change." When we judge by acts instead of years, we stop dismissing people prematurely—and we stop flattering ourselves based on time alone. The practical version of this is simple: notice when you're making assumptions based on age, then ask yourself what the person has actually done. That shift in attention changes how you listen, hire, and learn from people around you.

Source: Fragment 789, from Sophocles Fragments, translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 1996