Dr. Peter J. Weiss

Today, we’re going to talk about the third and final install­ment of learn­ing from expe­ri­ence.

We’ve talked about learn­ing a small thing and then gen­er­al­iz­ing a les­son from that to learn from expe­ri­ence at a high level. We’ve talked about apply­ing this con­cept in the things that you will learn to the sen­si­tive areas of your life, the per­sonal areas of your life, and over­com­ing your reluc­tance to do that. And I encour­age you to do that.

Today we’re going to talk about learn­ing from the expe­ri­ence of oth­ers. A lot of us learn things the hard way. We have to expe­ri­ence it our­selves and we get a lit­tle incre­men­tal learn­ing — just enough.

We don’t draw the larger lessons. An even bet­ter way to learn than through your own expe­ri­ence is learn­ing through the expe­ri­ence of oth­ers And a lot of peo­ple say they learn through the expe­ri­ence of oth­ers, but I don’t really think they do. A lot of us look at other peo­ple and we crit­i­cize them or we idol­ize them but we don’t learn from them.

When you read the paper in the morn­ing or watch TV and you see a CEO that has been fired from a com­pany for an affair, or when you see a vice-president of a com­pany go into jail for white-collar crime, or a politi­cian being removed from office for a scan­dal — do you just say, “I’m glad I’m not like them?” Do you just demo­nize them or blame them?

Or do you say, “Gee, I won­der what led to that. I bet they didn’t wake up one morn­ing twenty years ago and say, I’m going to work to throw away my whole career in twenty years through affairs or white-collar crime or some other scan­dal or big mis­take.” So the ques­tion is, could you learn about their behav­ior, their think­ing, and what led them to make that mis­take?

And then think about how to avoid that in your own life? What about peo­ple that are very suc­cess­ful, do you just look at them and envy them or do you think it’s just a stroke of luck that they became suc­cess­ful? Or do you think, “maybe I should study them maybe I should try to learn how they became suc­cess­ful and maybe there’s lessons I can learn from their lives and apply it to my own life.”

That’s learn­ing from the expe­ri­ence of oth­ers, and that’s the high­est level of learn­ing from expe­ri­ence. I hope you can do it.