LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

Learning, like thinking, is inevitable and at the essence of being human. If there is any mechanism or tendency or process that is a human “instinct,” it is learning. We see this in its most raw and primitive and essential form in small children— they are little ferocious learning machines! And yet ... what seems so instinctual, so intuitive, so basic to humanity is often, even frequently, lost. By the time many people get out of school, they are so turned-off about learning— they don’t want to read anything serious ever again. Many others have completely lost their curiosity and will only read or study whatever offers them some immediate short-term benefit.

Given all of that, there is a very strange myth about learning—it is that people learn best from experience. Now while it is true that the best learnings that we make seem to mostly arise from experiential learning, that is not the same thing as “learning from experience.” In fact, I think I can assert that if we’re talking about actual learning that makes a difference, then most people do not actually learn from experience.

To explain that assertion, I need to re-assert what real thinking and learning is. Merely repeating what you already know is neither actual thinking and it is definitely not learning. It is mere repetition of previous thoughts that were once heard and possibly learned. Real thinking means entertaining something that you did not know before, something new, something fresh. It is questioning what you know and delving into it—finding its premises and assumptions. Real thinking means embracing and entertaining what you do not know, what is unknown to you. Repeating what you already have thought and learned is, more often than not, an expression of the Confirmation Bias. You are using thinking to comfort yourself, reduce your anxiety, dampening your curiosity, and squashing your ability to learn.

When it therefore comes to experiences—most people do not learn from them. Instead, they use their experience to confirm what they already know. Or perhaps they use the experience to validate some stereotypical cultural perspective that they have grown up with. “See I told you, disasters happen in threes!” Actually, given all of the human biases, distortions, and fallacies— it is amazing that any of us learn from experience. We are so practiced in deleting information, distorting it, over- generalizing, and thinking through the filter of our biases.

To actually learn from experience requires a lot. The openness that it requires is an openness to being wrong, to mis-perceiving, to leaving out critical information. The receiving of data without automatically interpreting it through your meaning-making system means having a solid sense of self, sufficient ego-strength, to not need all of the ego-defenses that psychoanalysis and other therapies have identified.

To learn from experience requires also the ability to identify your current frames and try on some new and different frames for understanding the experience. And that means the ability to step back from yourself and think about your thinking. But that level of meta-cognition is severely under- developed in most people. In fact, while most people find that the Meta-State Model makes perfect sense and explains so much of their experience— that’s only after they come to understand it and that typically takes some time. At first, the meta-cognition in thinking-about-your-thinking seems weird and strange and takes some time to get use to.

Yet when you do come to the place that you can learn from experience— all of life takes on a very different feel. With the ability to truly learn from your experiences, every experience every day becomes a potential place of discovery. You begin to have insights about things not just once in a while, but regularly and eventually, every day. You have insights into yourself, into others, into how your career works, how your relationships work, and a thousand other insights. And with insights, you begin to have truly Aha! moments that often lead to all sorts of creative solutions to life’s problems.

This is an art. Let’s call it— The Art of Learning from Experience. And when you develop this capacity, then your relationship to the results of any action or communication becomes a cybernetic feedback system to you. That is, sudden what you have called “feedback” is not only no longer feared or dreaded, it becomes your way to sharpen and refine every skill that you have. And now you can experience the high quality kind of practice that distinguishes those who are experts in any and every field— “deliberate practice.”

The modern challenge today is learning, keeping up with all of the changes and updates in knowledge, and from using one’s experiences to learn from. If you don’t do that, you are sure to not keep pace with things and therefore fall back, even regress, from your current level of understanding and development. The modern solution is to learn the art of learning so that you can do something extraordinary, namely, learn from your experiences.