What do you do with your experience?

"Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him."
- Aldous Huxley

Everyone has a right to make mistakes. Everyone has a right to make the same mistakes repeatedly.

However, society tends to take a dim view of the wisdom of someone who makes the same mistake more than once or twice.

In many cases, the wisdom of a person who makes a mistake can reasonably be questioned when they were warned against doing something beforehand or when they had the opportunity to learn what they needed to know before following a particular course of action.

Behind their backs, others think of these people as being either stupid or arrogant (only rich people can afford the luxury of being called arrogant, the rest of us are simply stupid).

It's not necessary to grope through life doing everything based on trial and error. We can learn what we need before we act. But if we do act and make a mistake in doing so, we should learn from our mistake and avoid it in future.

Wiser folks among us will try to teach younger people what they have learned. Those who do not, show that they really have not learned a most important lesson of life.

Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to help people turn their experience into wisdom worth sharing.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl