What is the value of experience? Experience can be a double edged sword. When we don’t have any experience, we may think it prudent to wait until we have experience to pursue what we most desire. On the other hand, if we already have experience, we may think that we already “know it all” and feel there is no need to continue to learn and take risks to achieve personal and professional excellence. Either of these ways of thinking can be dangerous to our well being.
The amount of experience we have or don’t have isn’t nearly as important as our ability to take action. We will fail from time to time, but the more we try and fail, the more successful we will become. Many of us know the story of Thomas Edison and all of us benefit from his inventions. After more than 2,000 attempts at making a light bulb, he finally succeeded. A reporter asked him, “How does it feel to have failed over 2,000 times?” Edison replied that he had simply learned 2,000 ways how Not to make a light bulb. Experience is important but not nearly as important as what we learn from our mistakes that we often make in gaining experience.
Think for a moment of the first time that we are attracted to someone who rocks our world and makes our knees weak. The question arises, “How can I approach the person to find out if they will go out with me?” We tell our friends of our new found love and they tell us, “Go ahead, what are you waiting for?” In some cases, despite the suggestions and ribbing we get from our friends, we do nothing. We think of the possible rejection and “chicken out.” In other cases we take action and put our best foot forward. Sometimes we are successful and sometimes we crash and burn. Nevertheless, by taking chances and taking action, we gain experience and confidence. The result is of this experience is quite evident. The successes far out weigh the failures and as a result there has been a population explosion on planet earth!
From the time that we are born, we are taught that “no” is bad. A scientific study concludes by the time children reach the age of eight, they have been told “no” over 100,000 times! We rapidly learn we should avoid “no” at all costs and get to “yes”. While this seems to make sense, the real world functions quite differently. We must be willing to fail and to learn from those failures in order to achieve what we most desire.
Let’s remember the following:
1) Failure is an event; it is not a person. When we fail to achieve the results we desire, we should ask ourselves, “What can I learn from what has just happened and what can I do differently next time?”
2) People who achieve outstanding success in this world are not the people who never fail but rather those who fail time and again but who learn from those mistakes to make tremendous contributions to society.
Experience has a tremendous impact on our confidence both on the upside and the downside. The more we learn from our experiences, the more confident we will be in facing life’s challenges. As we face challenges and look for solutions to the difficulties we encounter, we obtain positive experience leading us down a road of personal and professional excellence.
∞ Rob McBride ∞