Chapter
7
Gain Experience
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits on a hot stove-lid; he will never sit on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also he will never sit on a cold one anymore.
Gaining experience is key to learning and growth—we learn best by doing.
However, just “doing” alone is no guarantee of success; you have to learn from the doing for it to count, and it turns out that some common obstacles make this hard. You can’t force it either; trying too hard can be just as bad (if not worse) than slogging through the same old motions.
In this chapter, we’ll look at how to make each experience count. We’ll see how to do the following:
-
Build to learn, not learn to build.
-
Fail efficiently with better feedback.
-
Groove your neural pathways for success.
That is, we’ll take a look at some key aspects to real-world learning and then see what you need to create an efficient learning environment for yourself. After that, we’ll take a look at how to get better feedback—to avoid the issues of Mark Twain’s overly generalizing cat (in this chapter’s opening epigraph). Finally, we’ll finish up with an interesting approach to gain experience virtually.