Dr. Peter J. Weiss

Today I’d like to talk to you about learn­ing from expe­ri­ence.  You might say, “Pete of course I learn from expe­ri­ence, doesn’t every­body?”

Well some peo­ple don’t.  I’m sure you can think of peo­ple who don’t learn from expe­ri­ence — peo­ple who keep repeat­ing the same behav­iors over and over and keep get­ting the same bad results — peo­ple who seem unable to learn.

I hope you’re not one of them. I’m assum­ing that you do learn from expe­ri­ence but my ques­tion to you is:  Are you learn­ing from expe­ri­ence at a high level?  Or are you just learn­ing “the basics” from the expe­ri­ences that you’re hav­ing?  I’d like you to be learn­ing from expe­ri­ence at a high level and I’m going to talk a lit­tle bit about how to do that today.

The exam­ple I’d like to use is a sim­ple one involv­ing work.  Let’s sup­pose you work in an office and you use an appli­ca­tion such as Microsoft Word.  One day you’re hav­ing a prob­lem.  You’re try­ing to do some­thing in Word, it’s very hard to do, and you can’t quite fig­ure it out.

As you’re strug­gling, your coworker Sally walks by.  She sees that you’re hav­ing a hard time, looks over your shoul­der and says, “Here, let me show you how to do that.”  So she gets in there and does it for you.  You watch her in amaze­ment and think, “This is great!

You know I’ve needed to learn this.  This is going to be so help­ful in my job going for­ward.” So you learned from your prob­lem, and what you learned was the solu­tion to that par­tic­u­lar prob­lem.

That’s great, but that’s a very low level of learn­ing.  Unfor­tu­nately, that’s how many peo­ple learn.  They learn only the solu­tion to that par­tic­u­lar prob­lem.  When they have another issue and Sally shows them the fix, they learn some­thing else.  One more prob­lem and they learn one more thing.  My ques­tion is:  When you had the first expe­ri­ence of Sally show­ing you that there’s a bet­ter way of doing what you’re try­ing to do, can you get a higher level of learn­ing right then?  Is there a larger les­son you can learn?

What if you said to your­self, “Wow, I learned to do that lit­tle thing, but it’s shown me that there might be a whole lot more to this appli­ca­tion that I don’t know”?  “There are prob­a­bly a lot of things in Microsoft Word that I don’t know.  I could be a lot bet­ter at it, if I got some train­ing.”

So you get some train­ing and you do learn to be much, much bet­ter at Word.  You learned a larger les­son from your expe­ri­ence with Sally and you were able to take your whole Microsoft Word exper­tise to a higher level based on learn­ing the larger les­son.

Can you take it to a higher level still?  Sure, I believe that you can. What if, after tak­ing the train­ing with Word, you said to your­self, “I bet this is just not lim­ited to Microsoft Word.  I bet there are many appli­ca­tions that I use here at work that I could prob­a­bly be bet­ter at.  In fact, there are many skills I use at work that I could be bet­ter at.

I can’t know until I get some train­ing.  I need to learn what I don’t know, and I need to make sure I’m as good as I can in all these areas related to my job.”  That’s learn­ing from expe­ri­ence at a very high level!  That’s hav­ing an “Aha!” moment when you learn some­thing that “Hey maybe there’s a whole bunch of things out there that I don’t know.

I need to find out what I don’t know.  I need to learn what can help me, and I need to change to be bet­ter at my job.”  That’s what I’m talk­ing about when I’m talk­ing about learn­ing from expe­ri­ence at a high level.