There is an old saying, “experience is like a comb, life gives it to you when you are bald.” The statement is partially true. After facing a new challenge, we often fail & think, “if only we had enough experience with it.” On the other hand, we can’t predict that challenges or circumstances will never appear again. That’s Why Experience Is Important.
Apart from traditional education, we learn a lot from maturity. We can use those lessons in our future lives to guide someone facing a similar circumstance. Undoubtedly knowledge is vital to our lives, but the skill to use that knowledge comes from maturity. With maturity comes wisdom. We don’t need to remind you about the significance of wisdom.
Significance Of Experience
1. It Allows You To Know Yourself
With experience, you can get to know yourself. The more maturity you gather, the more you know yourself & more you will be aware of your strengths, weaknesses & other aspects of your character. We all know knowing yourself can be beneficial for your personal & professional life. The more you learn, the more you become aware.
This self-awareness plays a vital role in building ourselves. There could be certain parts of you that were unknown. After experiencing something, you realize that. That may be good, that may be bad. If it is good, you can immediately figure out how to use it in your future life; if it is bad, you can find a way to rectify or check it.
2. You Can Differentiate Between Concept & Application
With real-life experiences, you can have the ability to differentiate between concept & application. Experience can tell you where & when, which concept is applicable & if any modification to that concept is required. Even the ability to modify the concept comes from maturity.
It is quite like wisdom. Like the concept that a tomato is a fruit, the application is not to put it in a fruit salad. All the theories might help you to create frameworks & evaluate them; it is the maturity that guides you to take vital action. Experience teaches you how to apply knowledge to generate favorable results.
3. It Teaches You How To Deal With Failure
We all know hardships & failures are inevitable parts of life. They will show their ugly faces no matter how hard we try to avoid them. While hardships may seem manageable, failures hit us in a brutal way. We often get depressed, bitter & lose all hope after encountering a failure. It is the experience that can teach us how to handle that failure.
Experienced people may have many successes but have had their fair share of failures, too. Despite failures, they never stopped moving & eventually reached their destination. Only maturity teaches us not to lose the spirit in the face of failure & bleakest hours. That is one of the reasons of Why Experience Is Important.
4. Experience Brings Out Leadership Qualities
To be a true leader, one must have some real-life experience. One answer to Why Lived Experience Matters is that it helps to bring out & nurture leadership qualities. All prominent leaders around the world have a great deal of maturity. Those experiences may be political, socio-economical, or in the commercial field. Experience makes leaders.
South African anti-apartheid activist & politician Nelson Mandela served 27 years in prison & he said later that maturity helped him to find new perspectives & strengthened his will. Experience not only makes a man, but it also makes leaders. You must have enough experience to lead your people in any useful direction.
5. It Helps You To Make Effective Decisions
With enough experience, you can have the capability to make effective decisions swiftly. Experience allows you to understand & assess a particular situation effectively & make fruitful decisions to manage the situation. While people without experience may make hasty decisions that will eventually turn into a disaster, experienced people won’t make that mistake.
With ample experience, they can assess the graveness & significance of a particular situation. They can also understand what will work & what will not. This assessment capability comes with maturity. A successful assessment produces an effective decision with favorable outcomes.
6. It Helps To Boost Your Career
Often experienced people are more valued in an organization than freshers. While the passion, effort & urge to prove themselves are top-notch in a fresher, experienced people know exactly what to do & they don’t need to go for orientation or training. Experience can be your tool to boost your career.
Of course, we all start as freshers, but we gather hands-on maturity in our journey. Not only working mindlessly & filing reports at the end of the day, but gathering maturity is equally vital. Those experiences can tell you how to accomplish more by investing minimum effort & time.
A fresher will do the work in eight hours; an experienced person can do the same in four hours. That’s how maturity can make you an effective employee & boost your career.
7. It Helps You To Know The Real World
In the drama ‘Arms & The Man’ by George Bernard Shaw, we find the protagonist, Captain Bluntschli, who escaped from the battlefield has chocolates in his pockets instead of guns & ammo. When another character Raina exclaimed about that, Captain Bluntschli said,” The young ones carry pistols & cartridges; the old ones, grub (food).”
Captain Bluntschli was a man of maturity who knew that surviving was more important than killing on a battlefield. In the same drama, we find another inexperienced character Sergius leading a cavalry charge against an army with guns. His luck favored that the army bought the wrong ammo. Otherwise, no horse or man could go beyond 50 yards.
That is the difference between experience & inexperience. It helps you to know the real world & helps you to act according to that. Experience can differentiate between courage & foolishness. It helps us to know what will work & what not.
Some Famous Books About Life Experience
Any biography or autobiography can tell us Why Experience Is Important. Apart from them, you can consider reading these books, too:
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl.
- All Creatures Great & Small by James Herriot.
- Educated by Tara Westover.
- Must I Go: A Novel by Yiyun Li.
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
- Chasing after Wind: A Pastor’s Life by Douglas J. Brouwer.
- Is This Anything? by Jerry Seinfeld.
- The Metamorphosis & Other Stories by Franz Kafka.
- Like the Flowing River Paulo Coelho.
- The Memory Tree by Britta Teckentrup.
FAQs
Q: What is the easiest way to gather experience?
A: You can talk to people with experience, but having your own experience, which comes with time & encountering various situations, is much more effective.
Q: Does experience always come from unfavorable situations?
A: Not necessarily; even pleasant situations can offer experiences. However, experience from unfavorable situations always brings a lesson.
Q: Does age always means experience?
A: Age is often associated with experience as seniors are supposed to see life more & gather experience from that. However, experience comes from exposure to the world rather than age.
