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Law Two

Always Make Your Learning
Greater Than Your Experience

Continual learning is essential for lifetime growth. You can have a great deal of experience and be no smarter for all the things you’ve done, seen, and heard. Experience alone is no guarantee of lifetime growth. But if you regularly transform your experiences into new lessons, you will make each day of your life a source of growth. The smartest people are those who can transform even the smallest events or situations into breakthroughs in thinking and action. Look at all of life as a school and every experience as a lesson, and your learning will always be greater than your experience.

Our ability to learn continually is what enables us to always have a future that’s bigger than the past. There is a method to doing this. Every experience you’ve ever had has two parts to it: the things about the experience that worked and the things that didn’t work. By worked we mean that those parts of the experience moved you forward, adding to your sense of capability and confidence. By didn’t work we mean the opposite: those aspects of the experience blocked or undermined your sense of capability and confidence.

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Once you identify these two aspects of every experience, you begin to become aware of new ways to maximize what worked, and to bypass or eliminate what didn’t. New insights, wisdom, and better, more effective ways of taking action become possible. In the process, the experience is transformed into a source of growth and gains new positive meaning.

Big Learning from a Small Experience

Even a small experience has the potential to be a source of major learning. Catherine shares this example:

I was coming home from my father’s house after a dinner. He had given me lots of wonderful leftovers to bring home, as well as my old microwave oven, which he’d borrowed, and a light fixture to try in place of a broken one in the house I had just moved into. It was late and I was tired. I looked at all the stuff in my trunk and thought, I can carry all this in one load. So I piled the fixture on top of the microwave, which was quite heavy but manageable for a short distance, and hung two bags of food on each wrist. Standing beside my car, I was quite proud of myself. Then I realized that I still had to close the trunk.

Bringing one knee up to support the microwave, I freed the hand closest to the car to push down on the trunk lid but misjudged my ability to maneuver with the weight of the bags hanging on my wrist. The lid came down quickly with a thud and latched. Sickeningly, I realized that my finger was caught in it. As the pain began to register, I realized that I would have to drop the microwave in order to free myself. Standing on one leg, there was no elegant way to do this. The light fixture hit the ground with a crash and sprayed broken glass. It was like a scene from an old slapstick comedy. I couldn’t have choreographed it better if I were Buster Keaton. Thankfully, my key fob with its button that opens the trunk was in my pocket, or I could have been stuck there for a long time.

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I managed to extricate myself, and my finger, though red and throbbing, was OK. The falling microwave had left a big white gouge in the side of my car and a hole in the front of my expensive new jeans. I felt incredibly stupid—busted for doing something dumb—and I was mad at myself. What had made me think this was a good idea? Then I began to think, OK, this is ridiculous. What is the universe trying to teach me here? And some very wise words that I had heard from my friend Edward Brown, a Zen priest, came into my head: “Carry one thing with two hands, rather than two things with one hand.” It couldn’t have been more literally true. I immediately saw what was not working.

In that moment, I realized that I’d been doing things like this all my life, and that I’d actually been lucky to have evaded disaster until now, albeit narrowly a few times. A grin began to creep across my face. Time to change my habits.

I had a blackened fingernail for a month as a constant reminder every time I was tempted to take on too much. I still have the scratch in my car, but it doesn’t make me angry anymore. Actually, I feel lucky. The lesson could have come when I was driving on the highway, talking on my cell phone, and eating a Popsicle: it could have been much worse. I don’t do things like that anymore. What worked about the experience was that it woke me up to a bad habit that was putting me in harm’s way.

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Now I try to pay more attention to doing one thing at a time and give myself permission to take a little longer. I’ve learned to say no when I need to, and to delegate better. I’m much less stressed, and, oddly, I actually seem to get just as much done. Not juggling so many things at once has allowed me to do a better job at what really matters and to see possibilities that I was too distracted to notice before. This very unglamorous experience, as soon as I looked at it in terms of what worked and what didn’t, taught me a lesson that has helped me to improve my approach to life and my results.