How to Learn From Experience Effectively

Introduction

Throughout our entire lives, we've always been told that we should learn from every experience, to see what we did well in our successes and understand our mistakes in our failures. However, how we learn from experience is less discussed. After reading a book called "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens, the subject of learning from experience was brought to the front of my mind. In this post, I'll try to unpackage the whole thing about learning from experience. How do we learn from experience, and how do we do it effectively?

How do we learn from experience?

Learning from experience requires internal reflection, and reflection by definition means thinking. As lazy humans that don't really want to expend more effort than needed, we often do all our thinking in our brains (sounds weird, but hear me out). Say if we just failed a test, we have a passing thought of, "I should probably work harder for my next test", then that's it. No further consideration, no further action on the experience, just the same approach over and over again.

One approach I would suggest in order to maximise the effectiveness of learning from experience is writing your thoughts down. It really helps to clarify your thinking and keep a record of your reflections if you see the words in black and white on a piece of paper or on a screen. It also forces you to think it through more carefully, because it's less easy for your brain to skip over the hard stuff and reach conclusions without reasonable logic otherwise. Personally, after every test, I will note down the questions I got wrong and make note of the things I need to remember in order to avoid making the same mistakes again. More generally, even just journaling and writing down your thoughts about each day can be very helpful to improve clarity of thought.

Another way to learn from experience more efficiently is to shorten the feedback loop, meaning that you should get feedback from yourself (self reflection) or others (asking for opinion) as much as possible. It's also entirely possible to set up a system to give you feedback automatically, like when you're using flash cards for revision, or using the Feynman method (where you teach others) for learning. The more frequent the feedback we get, the more we can learn out of our own mistakes. We can catch our mistakes early, and build on what we have done well. If the feedback loops are too scarce, it's often too late when we see that our entire direction was wrong since the beginning.

The feedback that you're trying to get from the experience should also be as actionable as possible. Simply "working harder" isn't going to cut it. I think that it's useful to note down exactly what you got wrong (or right), why you made that mistake (or were successful in that experience), and how you are going to apply what you learnt in the future. It might not guarantee that you'll fully absorb the experience and improve yourself, but it's at least better than giving it just a passing thought before moving on with your life.

Learning from not just yourself, but others

We often remember to learn from our own past mistakes and failures, but forget that there are seven billion other people in the world for us to learn from, not to mention the ones who are dead. Yes, we can gain valuable insights from our own personal experiences, but learning from the experiences of others in addition to your own is much more efficient, as you are able to learn more in a shorter amount of time. It allows you to avoid making mistakes that you've never made before, and compound what you learn over a longer period of your life.

This is also one of the reasons why I really recommend reading. It shows you so much of the outside world, of people and events, that you can learn from. Reading (or listening or watching) about the experiences of others can shorten the time span of many life lessons. What took decades for someone else to learn only takes you mere hours, albeit in a less permanent form and with less impact. However, as long as the seed is planted, when you come across a similar situation, you would have an idea of what to do about it and not commit the same mistake that you learnt about from the experiences of others.

Learning from both successes and failures

I've noticed that we are very selective with the experiences that we learn from, and in more ways than one. One particular aspect about learning from experience is that most people over-focus on either successes or failures, and often miss out the other side of the coin. And it's a very interesting phenomenon, let me explain what I mean.

Let's say you just failed a test (apologies for all the test related stuff, I'm a high school student that's currently in exam season). You flip through the paper and scan the pages for crosses, for marks lost, for things that you got wrong. But do you ever notice the things you got right, the things you did well, the things that you should continue to do in the future? By personal experience (correct me if I'm wrong), probably not. When looking at your own experiences, we are often so fixated on our mistakes that we gloss over our achievements and sucesses. Often times, it's just as important to ensure that you continue to do what you are doing well.

On the other hand, when trying to learn from the experiences of others, we often fixate too much on success stories, missing out the lessons that can be gleaned from their mistakes and failures. On this matter, I think it's not just a personal problem, but a society problem: we as a society place too much value on the successes of people, and not so much on the mistakes (which makes sense, but is still a shame). This can be seen on many levels. For example, I've read a couple of biographies including Elon Musk, Shoe Dog and The Ride of a Lifetime, and all of these books have success as their main focus. Even if there are setbacks and mistakes, it's always within the context of a minor setback that in the end led to success anyways. Furthermore, in academic research, experiments or approaches that don't work end up not being published. What this means is that there's a lot of resources wasted from people repeating failed approaches, simply because they didn't know that someone else had already attempted the same thing. If only we as a society can value information about what doesn't work as much as what does, I believe that we could have made much more progress.

Another name for this psychological loophole is survivorship bias. I'm sure all of you know the story about the statician Abraham Wald who was tasked with figuring out where to increase the armor of the Royal Air Force planes. He recommended the place where there were the least bullet holes, has he took into account the fact that there were planes that didn't manage to come back. In the same way, we should not only read the stories of the overnight successes and the prominent figures of society, but also the stories of those who have tried and failed. Learning from what didn't work can also be very valuable, however counterintuitive it might seem.

Conclusion

Above are my two cents on the subject of learning from experience. Everyone knows that we should learn from experience, but few people actually pause and ponder what learning from experience actually entails. I hope that you've learnt something from reading this post, or at least gave the topic a thought: how can I learn from experience more effectively?

For the past few months, I didn't really have any "inspiration" regarding blog post writing, but I managed to get this post out thanks to using the Zettelkasten method detailed in Sönke Ahren's book "How to Take Smart Notes". If you're interested in the subject, there are tons of resources online on Youtube and Google that can get you started. If you have the time, I would also highly recommend reading the book.