It has been seven years since I first walked into a World Economic Forum gathering as a Young Global Leader. I was inducted in the class of 2014, and the years since have included Davos, the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, the YGL summit in Geneva, smaller convenings, and a steady rhythm of dinners with fellow YGLs in New York. Long enough to form a real opinion about what the experience is, what it isn’t, and what I would do differently if I were starting over.

I’m writing this partly because I get asked about it. People hear “Davos” and want to know whether it’s worth it, whether it changes anything, whether the cynicism is deserved. The answer that holds up after seven years is that it depends entirely on what you bring to it and how you spend your attention. The Forum gives you proximity. What you do with proximity is on you.

So here is the letter I would have benefited from in 2014.

Stop trying to attend everything

In 2014, I treated my first WEF events the way an engineer treats a backlog: maximize throughput, minimize idle time, attend the next session, then the next. That instinct is wrong. The signal at the Forum is not concentrated in the headline panels. It’s in the corridor conversations, the small dinners, the late evenings where someone you respect says something they wouldn’t say onstage.

Pick three or four sessions per day at most. Leave room for the unscheduled. The best moments I remember from seven years of YGL events were never on the agenda. A walk back from a session in Tianjin where someone working on infrastructure in West Africa explained why a project I assumed was failing was actually succeeding by the right metric. A late conversation in Geneva about how to handle the loneliness of being the technical decision-maker in a room of business people. None of that was scheduled. All of it was the point.

Resist the urge to be impressed by yourself

This is the trap. The Forum is good at producing the feeling of importance. You wear a badge, you get into rooms, you meet people whose names you recognize from headlines, and there is a temptation, especially early, to mistake that feeling for evidence of having arrived somewhere.

You have not arrived anywhere. You have been given access to a community. The currency of that community is not your title or your invitation. It is what you actually do, who you actually help, and what you actually build between gatherings. The senior YGLs I respect most are the ones who treat the badge as an obligation rather than a credential. They show up to support younger members, they answer cold emails, they spend more time listening than talking. They do not, ever, post photos of themselves with famous people as a substitute for substance.

I learned this lesson by watching others get it right and wrong, and by adjusting my own posture when I noticed I was leaning toward the wrong end. If you find yourself drafting a post that boils down to “I was in the room with X,” delete it. Nobody owes you their attention because you stood near someone famous.

Imposter syndrome is the other trap

Imposter syndrome is the inverse of the first trap, and just as common at the Forum: the conviction that you do not belong here. You walk into a room with heads of state, Nobel laureates, and founders of companies you have used your whole adult life, and a voice tells you that you are about to be found out. That voice does not get quieter with time, and people who claim it does are usually performing a certainty they do not have. The phrase comes up often in YGL summit conversations, almost always once a small group is honest enough to admit to it. I have felt it. Most fellow YGLs I have spoken with have felt it.

I came into the community in 2014 with a heavy version of imposter syndrome. By then I had spent a decade leading newsroom technology teams and could point to work I was proud of, and I still sat in my first WEF events convinced someone had made a clerical error. The first few years were spent managing that. Then the voice swung the other way, after some risk-taking that paid off, and shifted from “you do not belong here” to “you have figured this out.” Both versions were wrong. Both were useful as data, neither was right as a conclusion. What has helped is treating the feeling as a calibration signal to cross-check against the actual record, not a verdict on whether I deserve to be in the room.

The pairing matters. The “I have arrived” feeling from the previous section and imposter syndrome are the same mistake from opposite directions. Both substitute a feeling for an honest assessment of what you have done and what you owe. The grounded YGLs I respect read the voice without obeying it. They notice the feeling, name it, and keep going. The third option, harder than either inflation or deflation, is to do the work and let the record speak.

The sessions are not the network

The single most useful thing I learned, and learned slowly, is that the sessions are mostly a coordination mechanism. They get people in the same place. The actual value compounds in the years between summits, when you can call a friend in Singapore about a regulatory question, or write to someone in Nairobi who has actually built the thing you are about to attempt, or get an honest read on a job offer from someone who has worked at the company.

That value does not appear if you treat the events as transactions. It appears if you treat the people as people. The YGL friends I see most often in New York, the ones who came over for dinner in 2015 and 2016 and 2019 and again earlier this year when Vish and Lin were in town, are the ones who have shaped how I think about leadership more than any plenary panel. None of those conversations show up on a CV. All of them show up in how I do my job.

What changed in the world

The Davos of 2014 was different from the Davos of 2021. The optimism about globalization that was the unspoken baseline of the early 2010s is not the baseline anymore. Brexit, the Trump years, the rise of populist movements across multiple continents, accelerating climate evidence, a global pandemic that exposed both the strengths and weaknesses of international coordination, and a generation of younger leaders bringing fresh perspectives to existing institutions. The Forum has been responsive to all of this. The agenda has shifted, the rhetoric has shifted, the framing of “stakeholder capitalism” has been sharpened, and the YGL community in particular has been a source of new thinking.

What I would tell my younger self is to engage with this shift fully rather than treating Davos as a static institution. The most useful YGLs I have worked with are the ones who use the convening power of the Forum to push for ideas that would not otherwise get a hearing in a single room. The Forum’s value is precisely that it puts heads of government, founders, scientists, and civil society leaders in conversations they would not otherwise have. The opportunity is to bring real proposals to those conversations, not to be a passive participant.

The advice that stayed with me

Some of the best advice I received during this seven-year stretch came from fellow YGLs in conversation, not from any session. Stephen Frost, a fellow YGL, said at the 2015 YGL Summit in Geneva: “There is no such thing as work/life balance. It is life balance.” That sentence has aged better than most of what I have heard in conference panels. Another YGL friend told me, after I described a job decision I was agonizing over, that the right question was not what the role would do for my career but what kind of person I would become while doing it. That changed how I made the decision and how I have made every decision since.

The friendships generate this kind of counsel. The Forum makes the friendships possible.

What I would do differently

If I were starting over in 2014, I would attend fewer sessions and have more dinners. I would write less about being there and more about what I learned. I would say no to about half the panels I said yes to and yes to about double the unstructured time. I would treat the badge as a responsibility to make introductions for others, not a license to ask for them. And I would stop, almost entirely, telling people I am a YGL. The people who need to know already know, and the people who don’t need to know are not why I joined.

Seven years in, I still get the same feeling I got in 2014 when I see the YGL community at its best. It is not the feeling of importance. It is the feeling of being in a room of people who are working to do something useful with whatever leverage they have been given. That is worth showing up for. Everything else is decoration.