Steem4nigeria Accelerator Contest Week 139: Is Experience The Best Teacher?

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From your understanding, Please define "Experience.

In the broadest sense of the word experience is the interface a person has with the real world through which you can comprehend your surroundings and the experiences that come your way. Through observation you are able to use 2 methods to comprehend reality:

• The current experience- the continuous and current information coming in through the senses (what you see, feel, & think as you read these words)
• The past observation over time that builds into memory (this is what turns moments into a skill, knowledge, or attitude).

What happens to you is not the experience it is what you do with it. An experience turns abstract knowledge into the kind of knowledge you can take with you when you go about deciding the next step to take.

Do you agree or Disagree with the statement "Experience is the best Teacher"? Defend your take.

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I would have to agree with this statement with only one important qualification. While I do think experience is the greatest teacher, I believe that a person can only receive this lesson through two distinct situations: the accumulation of knowledge that you gain through experience, and for use in building future knowledge.

While books and lectures allow us to discover how a certain skill or subject is accomplished, you only truly learn that topic when you physically enact it in the real world. You could read up on how to drive for years but without actually getting behind the wheel, or how to manage but until you are a manager yourself, the information cannot become yours alone. Information through experience becomes a much deeper form of learning, both in how you learn and with what emotions, but it also becomes much harder for it to be taken from you or lost than simple textbook material; learning through your mistake leaves a more ingrained memory.

Is learning from mistakes faster or slower than learning from books or mentor? Share with us your thoughts.

Learning through mistakes is usually slower but it becomes far deeper than from a mentor or from books.

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A book or a mentor will give us the answers right away, which will save you a lot of time, as well as save us from expensive mistakes or painful consequences. It's a fast way to receive years of knowledge in a few hours.

A mistake leaves much stronger emotional consequences, and information that comes through mistakes is the kind that sticks much longer than anything you have read in a book.

The fastest way of learning is a mixture of the two. Let the experts help you with some quick knowledge so that you will not have to fall many times during your course of learning, but that is also no reason to be afraid of the knowledge of mistakes, as they are there to help you master something in depth.

How would you balance between learning by experience and listening to someone who has been there.

The best way to balance experience and advice is to think of learning with experience as having a compass and an advisor with a map. An advisor, by letting you know about potential mistakes or the history they had, will have some shortcuts for you that will enable you to avoid unnecessary failures; this will build the framework for the skill or subject you want to learn. This also acts as a safety cushion in order to prevent us from having to re-invent the wheel of knowledge in order to understand it. Learning by experience, or our compass, enables the intuition to develop; and only through personal mistakes can we truly develop skill.

Thanks for reading my post I'm inviting @josepha, @rad-austine and @dove11 to participate.