The Experience Itself Is the Best Teaching
The experience itself is the best way to learn because otherwise it wouldn’t be us who learned, but rather those who lived the experience. Only through experiences and accepting mistakes and failures can we draw our own conclusions to move forward.
Learning is progressing and growing by overcoming the difficulties and obstacles, reflecting on the mistakes and overcoming them. To live is to experience, and this is part of our human essence and our instinct of curiosity.
Nobody is born learned
We could say that life is a journey of learning, and therefore, the only way to overcome it is by living. We never learn through the experiences of others, despite their advice, insistence and guidance.
The human being is a mammal that is born devoid of strategies of autonomy and independence. It is true that at birth we depend on adults to survive, even though it is also true that we instinctively and impulsively seek to have our own experiences to learn, and therefore grow.
“Experience is something you do not get until right after you need it”
-Sir Laurence Olivier-
Meaningful learning and discovery learning
Discovery learning is what one develops to discover the world for oneself and is always based on personal experience. On the other hand, meaningful learning is one that is acquired based on the acquired knowledge. The new knowledge gains sense and meaning when we relate it to the knowledge we already have.
Therefore, to learn, we need to explore, discover, fail and be right. That is, in many cases learning by trial and error until you find the path to success. Since we were very little, we learned more from our own experiences than from the advice of adults.
By living the experience itself, we internalize it meaningfully and deeply. So, although this takes us more time and effort, without any doubt, most of these teachings will stay in our memory accompanied by their respective emotional print.
“A thorn of experience is worth more than a forest of warnings”
-James Russell Lowell-
I have a right to be wrong
It is important to accept that, without any doubt, we will make mistakes, we will fail and we will be wrong. However, it is the only way to move forward and get to where we propose. We have a right to be wrong because we are not perfect, and this is not a failure, but part of the teachings of life.
If we want to learn, evolve and improve ourselves, without a doubt we are going to fail. However, getting up and moving on makes us stronger, braver and wiser. It gives us a collection of reasons to feel proud.
“Experience is never a failure because it always comes to show something”
-Thomas Alva Edison-
The learning path
If we go further and venture onto one of the paths that life presents us, it is necessary to make decisions and evaluate the results. Sometimes they will be successful and other times, however, we will have made mistakes. Despite that, the best way is always the experience and learning that stays with us. If we do not walk, we are blocked and do not evolve.
Blaming ourselves for failing is not accepting our human condition and losing the opportunity to continue learning and moving forward. We could say that the more mistakes we make, the more we are living.
“Life is learning, when you stop learning, you die”
-Clancy-
The experience of the years
Getting older is collecting vivid experiences and teachings. Otherwise, the years would be empty and we could say that we’ve gone through them, but we have not squeezed everything out of them that they could have given us.
The years going by are a great opportunity to be more and more aware of what we want and how to get it. To do so, aside from accumulating years, we accumulate learning experiences; some with mistakes and others with successes.
Although it hurts to fall, getting up makes us stronger
So learning is becoming stronger after our failures, getting up after falling and recovering even when being wrong hurts. Life is growth and therefore strengthens us. So, the best way is living different and multiple experiences, without fear of the result. In order to grow you must move forward and move on.
Falling is inevitable. We do it from the time we are very small, when we learn to walk, ride a bike, roller skate, etc…Failing is inevitable when we want to move forward, achieve our projects, go further or change something that does not make us happy. However, it is wonderful to learn and discover our capabilities.
If I Erased the Mistakes of My Past, I Would Erase the Wisdom of My Present
One mistake of the past can hald a great learning experience of our present. We wring out our mistakes and continue to grow. See more
