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that I haven’t learned much from experience
Experience is the best teacher!
“Experience is the best teacher.”
How often have you heard that? Too many times to count for me. I have even repeated it a few times.
I tell prospective insurance claims adjusters when I address them in one of our Adjust U classes or a presentation at an industry event, “You will learn things in the field that you cannot learn in class. You will also learn that you should have listened better in class, and taken notes. There is nothing in simulation or education that can exactly replicate knocking on that door and meeting that person who just suffered a catastrophic loss.”
There are ways in which experience is the best teacher. This is why the young person who avoids the “OK Boomer” mentality and listens to the voices of experience has an advantage over the know-it-all knuckleheads who act like all knowledge passed through their mother’s womb with them.
Experience is a harsh teacher!
Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward. -Vernon Law
Vern Law was a major league pitcher. He played for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1950-1967. He is 94. Several memorable and insightful quotes are attributed to him, none better or more often repeated than the one I just shared.
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Such reasoning is the voice of experience telling it like it is.
Don’t insist on learning everything “on the job” because too much of what you learn will be the (very) hard way. It may be true that nothing you do on the ground can prepare you for skydiving. Still, it is also true that everything you do on the ground prepares you for skydiving, especially the instructions you receive from those with experience and expertise in the matter.
“Don’t insist on learning everything ‘on the job.'”
The JourneyMan
Experience is an erratic teacher
The first two points I borrowed from others. This one is my personal observation now that I have 62 trips around the sun under my belt.
I have learned from experience that I have not learned enough from experience.
In most situations, there are too many variables for a formulaic approach.
Take raising kids for an example.
My wife and I raised three daughters. They are so much alike and so different, it is hard to say which is more true. I learned along the way that each of them responded in her unique way to stimuli, whether to discipline or encouragement. One approach to good effect on the firstborn might become a disaster if taken on the youngest.
The same is true in leadership in business. Experience with one individual or group may make you think you have a handle on handling personnel. Then, you meet a different individual or group, and everything you know is wrong.
Lessons I have learned from Experience but may need to relearn or unlearn later:
Experience is not a degree program with a graduation date and a diploma.
You know how, in credentialed professions, you are compelled to take CE courses and accumulate so many hours each term to renew that credential? Consider Experience as a continuing education program. You are always learning from it and never mastering it.
Experience may steer you wrong, but that is just another way it teaches you.
There have been times when I spoke up and the results convinced me silence was golden. But then I didn’t speak up in another situation and realized too late that I should have.
I was once a pastor.
A crotchety deacon said to me, “I don’t say anything, Preacher. I keep my mouth shut about things.”
He failed to see the irony in telling me how he doesn’t say anything.
Another deacon told me that he always spoke his mind. I did not tell him how that should not have taken as long as he dragged it out.
Experience teaches nuanced, adaptable, and sometimes confusing lessons.
Sometimes, you need to act and others, like the Eagles sang, “Learn to be still.”
I have heard tons of advice that began, “If experience has taught me one thing, it is”
Well, if Experience has taught me one thing, it is this: it has not taught me one thing but that doesn’t mean it has taught me nothing or that it is through with its lesson series.
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
Heraclitus