Other people’s experience

We are in an exciting time of challenge, change and growth.

With this change, you have to remember that all of the things that present themselves to you, are viewed through the lens of your experience.

One of the hard things to do is to expand your knowledge and experience to include other people’s experience and incorporate it as your own.

This is hard.  I have a tendency to discredit other’s experience in favor of my own.  Just because someone else did something, and failed, doesn’t mean I will fail too.

What it’s taken me a long time to learn is learning from other people’s mistakes is a shortcut with all kinds of benefits.

It’s much less painful, and cheaper, to learn from others.

You can watch, listen, and pay attention to what they did.  People everywhere are sharing their challenges, broadcasting themselves, and you can learn from them.

The problem is without the pain and emotion associated with those lessons, are not there.

You haven’t lost millions of dollars in the stock market.  You haven’t applied for that job and been rejected.  You haven’t tried that thing, and learned the hard way that it didn’t work.

So, how do you integrate the lessons others have learned into your life?

More importantly, how do you know which lessons other people are teaching that are true?

How do you bet the farm on someone else’s opinion?

History is written by the winners, and the winners more often than not were just plain lucky.  People tend to overestimate their skill, and underestimate the good fortune they have been fortunate enough to experience.

I don’t have a clear answer for this, but what I have learned so far is it comes down to your models.  Your coaches.  Your mentors.

The one tried and true lesson of authenticity, and lessons I take seriously, is when people speak from experience.  Or they say something like ‘I’m not you, but if I was you, this is what I might consider’.  Or ‘when I was in a similar situation, this is what I did, and this is how it turned out’.

The more input like that you can get, the better.

If you can find the wise person who has already walked down the path, and is coming back and serving as a guide.  ‘This is what’s up ahead, and here’s how I dealt with it’ is an amazing gift.

So use your best judgement, and choose carefully who you learn from.