“Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.”
C.S. Lewis
They say that experience is the best teacher. And that may be true, but I would argue that learning from the experience of others is a faster and potentially far less painful experience to learn from.
“A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience”
Elbert Hubbard
I recently read an article about 30 Things Divorced People Think You Should Know About Marriage. It had some good advice on having a happy marriage from people who wished they knew what they know now before their first marriage failed. Now that they know better, they are working to do better and trying to help others do better too.
John Gray wrote his bestseller Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus (get it at Amazon) to help men and women communicate better. He wrote it after he was divorced. It has some really useful information in it.
Scared Straight was a program that was started by people in prison to help juvenile offenders change their behaviors before they end up in prison too.
Recovering Alcoholics are often key to helping others to avoid letting their addiction to alcohol ruin their lives too.
After being involved with white supremacists from his early teens until his 20s, Christian Picciolini founded Life After Hate to help others break away from hate groups. His organization has helped hundreds get to a better place in life. Click here to go to lifeafterhate.org
As human beings, we all have an incredible potential to learn. Luckily, we can learn from the experience of others. We can learn from the experience of those around us. We can learn what to do and what not to do by watching the good and bad experiences of others.
“Experience is the best teacher, but a fool will learn from no other”
Benjamin Franklin
And we don’t even have to limit ourselves to the experiences of those we know. We can read. With technology, we can easily study the lessons from the greatest and worst people throughout history and across a wide range of cultures.
Learn how to learn. Be curious. Read. Invest in yourself. Find what you want in life and find people who already have achieved it. Learn from them. Study their behavior and try to repeat it. But don’t just learn what they did right. Understand what they did wrong too. Failure is part of success for most people. Learning from the mistakes of others can speed up your success exponentially.
Yes, learn from your mistakes. But don’t limit yourself to only your mistakes. Learn from the mistakes of others too. Make the experience of others a great teacher too. It will save you time and suffering.