Experience alone is not enough: Seven lessons on learning from experience

You’ve probably heard it said that “experience is the best teacher”. That’s actually not true. You can go through decades of doing something without gaining any knowledge or insights that would make that metaphorical teacher truly proud of you. Rote learning, as defined by Richard E. Mayer (Mayer, 2002), is rote learning, whatever the context. It’s also easy to draw the wrong lessons from experience. Leveraging experience to your benefit is more complicated than just going through life.

When I was a teenager, at my sensei’s dojo, there was also a martials store. My friends and I would go in from time to time when we needed a new gi or new knee pads, or when we just wanted to browse for a few minutes.

I was fascinated then by the katanas (Japanese swords) and the bokkens (practice swords) and all the interesting articles on the walls. The first item I ever purchased with my own money at the store was a poster of a judoka executing a perfect throw in the snow, which ended up on the wall above my bed and stayed there for years.

There was also a display with martial arts books. The ones that had pictures showing how to execute the techniques of judo were the first to catch my attention. Others had nice covers but when I opened them, were just filled writing – not a single picture! Those would go immediately back on the shelf, not to be looked at again for a very long time.

I had probably been practicing judo for 20 years when one of those “boring” books that had been there all along finally caught my attention. Written by Jean-Lucien Jazarin, who had been president of the College of Judo Black Belts of France for 23 years, the title of the book was Le judo, école de vie, which translates to English as Judo, a School of Life. Considered a classic in the French judo community, it was never translated to English as far as I know.

The book blew my mind. Its effect on me was so profound that it instantly got me over my long-time aversion to writing in books! The pages of my copy, which I still refer to often, are covered with notes. Passages throughout the book are underlined, while others have stars and other squiggles in the margins next to some especially important ideas.

Reading Jazarin’s books coincides with the moment when I stopped simply practicing judo on the tatamis and started reflecting about the more fundamental aspects of the practice. One book led to another as I started collecting martial books. Some were good, and many were not. The good ones, like Jigoro Kano’s Mind Over Muscle, helped me go deeper and deeper into the philosophical aspects of martial arts practice, and prepared me for the day that, via Harvard’s Michael Sandel, I eventually came across the writings of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and his discussion of what constitutes a “practice”.

When I read pages 190 and 191 of MacIntyre’s After Virtue, my head almost exploded as various threads of reflection suddenly clicked into place. My annotations on those two pages pretty much tell the story.

From there, as the years went by, my readings took me to Jiyuan Yu’s The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle, and eventually to Lorraine Smith Pangle’s Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship (friendship is one of Judo’s 8 core values), among many others that I count as key milestones on my personal journey of reflection on practice and experience.

Against that backdrop of living and reading, I had also started writing.

I recently came across a quote by Joan Didion that, in hindsight, captures my journey perfectly: “I write entirely”, Didion wrote, “to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” (Didion, 1976)

As I came across new ideas and had important experiences at work, at home, or in the dojo, I would write about them. I wrote my first reflection about judo here on LinkedIn on October 9 of 2016, in a piece titled From the Dojo to the Office: Reflections on Respect, Collaboration and the importance of Culture. That first piece was followed, two months later, by another one titled Five Things Leaders Should Never Forget.

The more I reflected, the more I started noticing how some of the core tenets of judo were often at odds with the way things are done outside of the dojo. I often found myself conflicted between my judo-inspired moral beliefs and the day-to-day reality of life in society, or of my work as a corporate executive. As I wrestled with those ideas and contradictions, my blog kept growing and now numbers about 140 articles in 8 sections. The section titled “Culture of judo”, alone, includes 40 articles.

Along the way, as my ideas sharpened, my own path became clearer.

The journey I outlined above is directly responsible for the nature of the work I currently do, and how I approach it. Judo, as a method of physical, intellectual, and moral education, is concerned with developing good people who contribute positively to society. The question at the heart of my own reflections is “how to be a good person”. And that, to me, is especially important for leaders.

People in positions of authority have an outsized impact on what happens to us as students, as employees, as congregants, and as citizens. What it means to be a good leader – or a bad one –  is therefore of the greatest importance and that is where I have directed much of my thinking and much of my efforts on the professional front.

Like I said earlier, the idea that “experience is the best teacher” is actually not true. There’s a more accurate way of putting it, which I often use with clients:

“Experience is the best teacher ONLY if you can learn from it. And you learn from experience when you step back and reflect, drawing lessons from it. You need to get ‘‘on the balcony’’ and look down on your experience from a distance, as General Gordon Sullivan says in his book, Hope Is Not a Strategy.” (Hollenbeck et al., 2004)

But even that, to me, is still incomplete. Based on reflecting on my own experiences as a judoka, a teacher, a corporate executive, and just a regular person going through life, I offer seven other dimensions that, for leaders of today, are essential to learn effectively from experience:

1. It’s unlikely you will magically go from experience to profound insight. To help reflect on experience, a sound theoretical foundation – of ideas, and models, and concepts – matters tremendously. Sound theoretical knowledge does matter and don’t let anyone tell you that it doesn’t.

2. Oversimple ideas and facile arguments are a weak foundation for serious development. Things are rarely simple or black-and-white. The hard work of figuring out what is the right thing to do as a leader, a colleague, a friend, etc. requires engaging deeply with the discomfort of complexity and ambiguity.

3. Self-improvement takes time and effort. It’s an expensive investment in yourself, and worth everything you put into it.

4. We are poor judges of ourselves, and others often see us much more clearly than we do. Being open to feedback from others who observe us from the balcony or the dance floor is good. Inviting such feedback with real sincerity is even better.

5. Anything you know about anything, including yourself, is provisional. Being open to the possibility that you don’t actually know is essential to learning.

6. Follow the flow of ideas and experiences with genuine curiosity, like water finds its way through the landscape.

7. Realise that the journey never ends.

Experience is a teacher, sometime gentle, sometime harsh. Whether experience is also a wise teacher requires something more from you.