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

Here is my entry

Experience is not just the good or bad things that happen to us, but what we learn from what happens to us. This life has a funny way of teaching us lessons when we least expect it. Sometimes the lesson comes from success, and other times it comes from failure, embarrassment, heartbreak, or even a simple mistake someone can make that can bring irreversible bad experiences. To me, experience is the practical knowledge we gain by going through situations personally. It is also the voice inside us that says, “I have been here before.” Experience changes and shapes our thinking, strengthens our decisions, and helps us grow wiser with time when we learn from it.

I strongly agree with the statement, “Experience is the best teacher.” Books can guide us, mentors can advise us, but experience gives us firsthand understanding. Nobody truly understands the pain of failure of another person until they fail at something important and experience it themselves too. Nobody fully appreciates success until they struggle for it. Experience leaves deep lessons in our hearts because we feel them personally by ourselves. As a student, there are things lecturers explain in class, but until I experience them practically during clinicals or exams, the lesson does not stay deeply in my memory for a long time. Experience teaches with emotion, and emotional lessons we learn daily are very difficult to forget.

Learning from mistakes can sometimes be both faster and slower than learning from books or mentors. It is faster because mistakes leave old and powerful memories in the life of a person. For instance, once you touch a hot pot accidentally, you will hardly repeat it again. But it can also be slower because some mistakes may have deprived us of our time, money, opportunities, or even relationships to correct it, for instance, getting burnt by a gas explosion due to your carelessness. That is why books and mentors are important. They help us avoid unnecessary pain by teaching us lessons they already learned the hard way.

Personally, I believe wisdom is knowing when to learn from others and when to learn by yourself. A balanced person listens to advice but still allows room for his/her personal growth through their experience. For example, if an older person warns me about poor time management, I should listen carefully. But at the same time, I may still face small challenges that will teach me how important discipline truly is. For a better understanding, I would say that experience confirms what advice teaches.

Experience is one of life’s greatest teachers because it transforms information into understanding. Yet, the smartest people do not wait to learn everything through pain. They combine
the wisdom of mentors, the knowledge from books, and the lessons from personal experiences and also the experience of other people closest to them. This combination creates maturity, confidence, and growth in an individual and the society.