Experience

Experience

"Experience is the comb that nature gives us after we are bald." – Belgian Proverb

The above quote is perhaps the best commentary on the concept of experience I've ever read.

Cynically put, but an incredibly insightful way to think about the process of gaining experience.

If I knew X, I wouldn't have done Y.

But if you didn't do Y, you wouldn't know X.

What we learn when we do something wrong doesn't just apply to the situation that taught us, it helps us build models for interpreting and responding to reality in general.

"There is no failure, only feedback." – Naval Ravikant

Experience by Visualize Value

Leverage is as much about where you are standing as how much force you are applying.

If you are building something, it is far more useful to focus on the work you are doing to produce the result than the result itself.

The constraint we apply to package our idea determines their reach & resonance. "Make 1 decision to eliminate 1,000 decisions."

Labor is generally a more interchangeable resource than vision.

To help understand this idea, consider the contrast between the two concepts ancient Greeks used to think about time.

It should be relatively simple to identify when we aren't accumulating net new experience, but in practice, it doesn't seem to be.

Language is an incredible tool. It makes it possible for us to externalize what we think and communicate it to others.