“Experience is what you get after you needed it most” -Unknown

One of the most inspiring statements I have heard about the use of the past is this, “Learn the lessons and forget the details”. I have also heard things like, “Experience is the best teacher”, “Experience is a costly teacher, but a fool will learn by no other” and statements like, “it’s the experience and wisdom of others that the old man uses to pose as wise”. These are all statements that in their own ways place value on experience.

There are three principles that govern the study of history.

1. Things are the way they are, because they got that way.

2. Those that don’t know history are destined to repeat it.

3. Not knowing the things that happened before you were born, makes you forever a child.

History, experience or the past, holds a well of knowledge. The past is past, but the past must leave the present better, else the past is likely to be repeated. We must decide to learn from our experiences, to improve ourselves and the world around us based on what we have been through.

A fundamental difference between school and life is that in school, the test comes after the lesson, but in life, the lessons come after the test.

In school we pass or fail the test, in life we succeed or gain experience, we never fail!

In this day and age, where every employer wants to recruit experienced people, where investors want experienced business men, we must take our lives a bit more seriously. We must venture more, try more, do more, and learn as we grow. Expand your horizons, a man who has the same view of the world as he did 20yrs ago, has wasted 20yrs of his life. Experience is not experience because we were paid for it, experience is experience because we did it.

He that grabs a cat by the tail, learns a lesson he can learn no other way. – Mark Twain

Don’t let fear rob you of choice experiences, to try and not succeed places you far above those timid souls who know neither success nor failure because they never tried. Step into the shoes of successful people ahead of you. Step into the shoes of Thomas Edison, the father of Electricity, who discovered 1000+ ways of not making light bulb. Step into the shoes of Thomas Watson (MD-IBM) who said,” to increase my success rate, I double my failure rate.” Step into the shoes of Micheal Jordan, who said, “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Experience is not what happens to a man, it’s what a man does with what happens to him. – Aldous Huxley