Experience matters but it does not have to be based on the length of time. Experience comes with exposure and exposure is two prong; direct and indirect. Learning through direct engagement takes a longer time as compared to learning from people who have direct experience.
Later provides the opportunity for you to get experience much greater than the number of years put in by you yourself. However, you need both to be “an experienced professional”. When you learn from watching other people, you are learning about the choices they make and the results of those choices. If the results are positive, you are more likely to make the same choice. However, if the results are negative, you will probably make a different choice.
‘Life experience’ is an experience that is crucial for people to build a successful and happy life. Experience facilitates better decision making and more effective application to increase the rate of success. Rather than learning life experience through your own trials and wild attempts, it is wiser, easier and less costly to learn through others’ experience.
Typically, you have to wait for regular life events to happen to gain experience of your own. Your life experience is full of failures and successes, with this; you can learn from the mistakes to prevent them from recurring and the successes to reproduce them more frequently for repeated benefits.
You have heard the saying, “experience is your best teacher.” If you wait to only learn from your own experience, it’s only one teacher you can learn from, whereas if you develop the habit of learning from others too, then you have more than one teacher to learn from which would facilitate faster learning and also give you a much broader perspective. Although this kind of experience may not be as pure as the one you will experience yourself, it is quite useful given that each individual has limited opportunities of their own. Mixing and matching your own experience with the learned experience of others around you can make you an accurate judge.
Embrace and conquer
Sometimes you have to embrace life and then conquer it in order to gain that particular life experience. In the quest of learning, other people’s successes and mistakes are the perfect case to study on. We learn a lot through the trials and journeys of others and our mind can simulate the words and actions from those scenarios and outcomes.
Looking back to the past can help find the answers to your future. It’s important to remember the consequences of different actions in the past. The principle is that everything else being constant, you are sure to have the same result by repeating the same action. Learn life experience through others by observation and yourself by reflection.
Consumer is common in many instances for a variety of products and service offers. Attitudes, behaviors, desires and the way the consumers respond to various strategies and offers can be the same. Identification of these common buyer behaviors and learning from the experiences of other businesses and marketers can reduce your research and experiment cost and the time spent. While learning is an important aspect for business success, the cost of failure is an absolute waste. You can improve your business learning curve by carefully analysing data from those who’ve already “been there and done that.” You can learn from their experience – whether that experience is good or bad.
Learning from others’ experience can be applied to buying products or acquiring anything you want; everything from bread to an automobile, choosing a career, becoming successful in business, selecting a marriage partner or raising children. For a business; which media mix is best for a premium priced consumer brand? How does the common consumer respond to a discount promotion?
You can benefit from others’ experience in just about any area – eating healthy, doing studies, taking a vacation, buying or selling your home, being happy or creating a life of abundance and wealth. It’s not about learning from role models but from common people. Why not give it a try and start mastering the art of learning from others’ experience the next time you have an important purchase or an exciting adventure in front of you? “Experience is the better teacher.” Well this premise will never go away.
