Rushing Experience? Or Supercharging Knowledge!

Let me take you back to 2008. Olympic athletes were gracing the field in Beijing, the iPhone was but a year old, Elon Musk launched his first SpaceX rocket into orbit, and the initial cracks of the global financial crisis were quickly becoming chasms.

Whilst all of this was going on, I recall a coaching session where one of my mentors remarked “you can’t rush experience”. I have no recollection the context of the statement, but the feeling of how truistic and obvious the statement seemed stuck for some time.

Maybe I was missing something, but of course we can’t rush experience; a clock always ticks at a rate of 60 seconds per minute. Even if we fill every one of those seconds with activity, there must, I thought, be an immutable barrier to the rate of experience growth beyond that. Rushing must, I agreed, be a fool’s errand.

In the subsequent decade, I’ve realised that we weren’t entirely correct. Hence, let me recount what an extra decade of experience has taught me about… experience, and more importantly, about knowledge.

Experience is often described with an extraordinarily rich and diverse set of definitions:

• Some say it is the lessons we learn by doing things; the more we do, the more we get.
• Others see experience as the wisdom we derive from our mistakes. This one is probably a better definition than the first as it implies that we learn more when something goes very wrong (or very right) than when we perform a task with no discernible outcome.
• Others still describe experience as something that you don’t get until just after you need it. I like this one; it aligns nicely with Murphy’s Law, but also highlights how we learn as much from our analysis of a situation that we didn’t understand at the time, as we do from the situation itself.
• Perhaps more profoundly though, Einstein described experience as “the only source of knowledge”. In other words, experience can be more important than the facts themselves. 

Amongst this diversity of definitions, there is almost universal agreement that more experience is better than less, because more experience often correlates strongly with more knowledge. Don’t mistake this conclusion as decrying the value of fresh eyes; the two are far from mutually exclusive. Indeed, both relate directly to how we sense, and therefore frame, the world around us, a mental process which is driven by our emotions (which it turns out are in turn driven by our experiences – confused yet? I was!).

Studies suggest that we learn best when we are absent of stress but experiencing highly positive or negative emotions. Stress and emotions are different. Stress is only present to help us deal with imminent difficulty or danger. Emotions last longer and are more detailed. An example might be when a manager hears news that their project go-live is on the brink of failure. The stress might initially cause them to flee the environment, before their body then tells them it’s safe to return, at which point they’ll probably come back still experiencing emotions such as “fear-of-failure” or resolute defiance that they “will not fail”.

It turns out that where stress is inbuilt, emotions are built from our experiences. Lisa Feldman-Barret, a Psychology and Neuroscience Professor from the United States used 25 years of research to describe how emotions are essentially predictions that our brain is making to “help us to make sense of the world in a quick and efficient way… your brain does not react to the world. Using past experience, your brain predicts and constructs your experience of the world.”. In other words, our brain tells us what emotion to use based on which ones we have successfully used in a similar experience in the past (it’s a brilliant TED talk – well worth a watch here).

Let’s bring this together; experience, emotion and learning are all intricately intertwined, and combine as follows to create knowledge:

• The best learning is gained from good or bad experiences (rather than ones with no discernible outcome)
• We learn best when we are absent of stress, but feeling good or bad emotions
• Our brain uses our past experience to predict the world around us, which then manifests as good or bad emotions.

In other words, rather than rushing experience, the focus should be on how we can get the most knowledge from it by managing the experiences themselves, as well as the associated emotions, stress, and learning to supercharge our growth. Here’s a few tips on how you might do this:

• Manage your experiences: If you allow yourself experiences where you are always mildly successful, you won’t get the same learning as someone who operates one step beyond their comfort zone on a regular basis. In my industry, that means taking on the tough consulting projects others shy away from. But this needs to be balanced, as continual failure due to overstretching is bad for stress and emotions (not to mention career progression!). Everybody is different, though my approach has been to aim for around 40/60, where the 40 percent are really complex projects, and 60 percent more are the more achievable ones.
• Manage your stress: This is critical. A lot of folk internalise evermore stress as their career grows, which results in the growth of their knowledge slowing just as they need it to accelerate. Nobody expects people to be superhuman, and descending into fight-or-flight reactions from time to time is normal. But it’s important to minimise this. The answer is different for everyone – for some it is exercise, for others it is music, a craft, reading or family. Whatever it is for you, make sure you know your signs of stress and keep options open to practice a de-stressing mechanism when you need to do so.
• Participate in as many debriefs as you can: You learn from all experiences; whether you’re the primary actor or otherwise. Going back to the Murphy’s Law-esque definition of experience, if experience is something that you don’t get until just after you need it, it’s logical that we should try to be a part of as many experiences as we can to widen our frames of reference. If this can’t be done in person, a free-and-frank debrief is the next best thing.
• Read widely: The more exposure you can have to the experiences of others, the better equipped you will be to grow from your own. Reading is one of my favourite de-stressing mechanisms, as well as a great way to learn from others that you might otherwise never have access to. For example, I just finished reading Cicero’s biography. I doubt much of what he experienced in the Roman Senate will ever be directly relevant to me, though some of his finest political maneuverings were used to manage highly complex and dynamic human behaviours in a range of his peers and competitors – perhaps that might be useful! 
• Fresh eyes: Consciously try to apply different emotional frames to every situation you encounter. The predictions mentioned earlier that constitute our emotions facilitate rapid decision making, but they can blind us as well. Exercising the mental process of evoking different emotional frames is a great way to both maximise learning from experience, as well as to think laterally. Bringing others in and asking them to do the same is another useful technique to help you grow your own internal ‘data lake’ of what different experiences really mean and how to apply the resultant predictions in the future.

I’ve often thought how I would alter that statement of my mentor a decade ago. I suspect the answer might go something like this: “Don’t worry about experience; what’s important is knowledge, and this comes from experience, learning and emotion – focus on getting all three right, and knowledge will follow!”