What Experience Builds in Us
I have been thinking about experience.
We usually talk about experience as if it has value by itself. Someone has twenty years of experience. Someone has been through difficult things. Someone has traveled, worked, raised children, built businesses, lost money, made money.
But I don't think experience by itself necessarily means very much.
You can experience the same thing many times and remain exactly where you were.
So maybe the real question is not:
What have I experienced?
Maybe the question is:
What did the experience build in me?
I keep coming back to four things:
Experience. Understanding. Capability. Self-command.
They seem connected.
Experience comes first because we have to encounter reality somehow.
We try something. It doesn't work.
We trust somebody. Maybe we were right, maybe we weren't.
We make a decision and discover consequences we couldn't see when we made it.
We read a book and suddenly recognize something from our own life.
We raise children and discover that all the theories about parenting become considerably less clear when an actual child is standing in front of us.
Reality gives us the material.
But then something has to happen to that material.
We have to understand it.
And this is where I think experience can easily be wasted.
Something happens and immediately we explain why it happened. Who was wrong. Why circumstances were unfair. Why our decision actually made sense. Why next time everything will be different.
The explanation may even be correct.
But did we understand anything?
Understanding seems to require something more uncomfortable.
Looking at what actually happened without needing reality to agree with the story we had about it.
And if we do that enough, something interesting happens.
Understanding begins to turn into capability.
I no longer merely know what I should do.
I can do it.
There is a tremendous difference between those two things.
You can understand calmness and still lose yourself when something goes wrong.
You can understand investing and still panic when the market falls.
You can understand boundaries and still start explaining yourself the moment somebody asks, “But why?”
You can understand responsibility and still automatically pick up problems that belong to somebody else.
Capability begins when the understanding is available under the actual conditions in which it is needed.
And then there seems to be one more step.
Self-command.
This one interests me the most.
Because a capable person can still be controlled by circumstances.
He may know exactly what to do and still be unable to govern himself long enough to do it.
Fear can govern him.
Anger can govern him.
The desire to be understood can govern him.
The desire to be liked can govern him.
Comfort can govern him.
Circumstances can govern him.
So perhaps self-command is when all the things we have experienced, understood, and learned to do finally begin to belong to us.
Not because we control everything around us.
Quite the opposite.
We stop requiring the world around us to cooperate before we can remain who we choose to be.
And maybe that is why these four things belong together.
Experience gives us the material.
Understanding tells us what the material means.
Capability allows us to use it.
Self-command determines what we do with it.
This is also why I don't think difficult experiences are automatically valuable.
Difficulty can make us wiser.
It can also make us bitter.
Success can make us confident.
It can also make us foolish.
Failure can teach us.
It can also teach us nothing.
Experience doesn't decide what it becomes.
We do.
And eventually the experience itself disappears.
The argument ends.
The job ends.
The children grow up.
The money comes and goes.
The difficult year becomes something we barely remember.
The book goes back onto the shelf.
But perhaps something was constructed while all of that was happening.
Something that wasn't there before.
A little more understanding.
A little more capability.
A little more command of ourselves.
The circumstances are gone.
What they built in us remains.