Lately, I have been pondering on this quote that says “Experience is the best teacher” and I totally disagree with this quote. I think that experience is a good teacher but it is definitely not the best teacher. Be calm and let me justify my point.
Yes! Life is full of experiences both good and bad and we are supposed to learn from every experience. Experience in this context is mostly associated with the negative thus, it reminds you of things you’ve done wrong or a wrong someone did to you, it makes you remember your mistakes and enhances regret.
This is a topic I really really want to explore because i get uncomfortable when i hear statements like “you don’t have the experience so you wont know how to handle it” or “you went to a private school so you can’t handle streets”. Whatever happened to information? Why do you have to experience something before you have the knowledge about it? Someone once said if you think experience is the best teacher why don’t you contact HIV and let the experience teach you..lol..but really it is the truth..victims of the disease wish they had a proper orientation on how to avoid it and that is the reason you’ll hear them make statements of regret like “if I had known”.
Most people learn from bad experiences they’ve had as the more painful the experience, the stronger/deeper the lesson. But how many of us really learn the right things from these experiences? Imagine a girl that has had numerous heartbreaks in her relationships deciding to make her next boyfriend pay for all the heartbreaks she had in the past. Has she learnt the right thing from her experiences? You see, the whole idea is to be smarter and not to jump from one mistake to another all in the name of learning.
I think people use knowledge and understanding interchangeably but there is a huge difference. We don’t have to experience a situation before we are knowledgeable about it! Experience doesn’t give you knowledge, it just makes you understand better. For instance, in a work setting employers would always prefer a candidate with work experience not because the other candidate doesn’t have knowledge about the job but because the former is expected to understand it better but ONLY if he is knowledgeable about the job and not just entering blindly with no prior information regarding the job. A candidate that has experience without knowledge will be unable to handle sudden changes but a candidate with knowledge is better prepared and will have an idea of how to handle flexible situations. Do you get my point?
Experience teaches in some cases but when it finally teaches it is already too late, the deed has been done, the havoc has been caused. Won’t it be better if when experience comes wanting to teach you a lesson and you tell it you have learnt it already?
Really ehn, the world is changing and developing. Lets not do things with closed eyes people. You don’t have to go through a painful experience when it can already be avoided through proper research and orientation. With information, you learn better and are better equipped to face the situations that come your way!
Empower yourself with information because information will definitely keep you in formation!
copied from Amarachi Asinobi
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