5 Best Ways to Learn from Other People’s Experiences
Experience is a great teacher. But we don’t only need to learn from what we go through. Others’ experiences can be your best teacher too. Why make the same mistakes as others have if you can avoid them? Why not learn from those who have gone before you and found success?
What journey are you on? Are you an athlete aspiring to be a champion? Are you an entrepreneur building a successful business? Or are you on the journey of life following your calling?
These are the 5 Best Ways to Learn from Other People’s Experiences.
Learning from others is not a one-time event but a process. It’s not a passive process though. To get the full experience, you need to be engaged, motivated, and committed to learning.
When you open your mind to learning, you grow in all areas of life, gain knowledge, and become wiser.
Learning is a great way to inspire you to dream more and take action to achieve those dreams. The beauty in it all is that others have gone before you and already paved the way. You just need to follow the path.
Why should you learn from Other People’s Experiences
From a young age, we often think that learning only takes place at school. But we’ve been engaging in a different type of learning all our lives without realizing it. It’s called social learning.
It has to do with people around you and learning in a social context. This could be your family, friends, or teachers.
When you watch and interact with others you learn about the real world and how it works. You learn from others’ successes and failures. You learn the consequences of the choices they make whether negative or positive which helps you make the best choice in a situation.
For example, if someone you know works hard and becomes a doctor you learn the importance of hard work. Yet if someone else you know steals and goes to jail, you learn the importance of not stealing.
While there’s definitely power in blazing your own trail, and there’s merit in doing your own thing at times, the concept of staying on the path is learning from the experience of others.
If their goal started out similar to mine, then that’s the path I need to take. It’s when my goal becomes individual to myself that I would veer off to blaze my own trail.
My path won’t look the same the whole way as it does for others, but I can use the given path all the way to the point where I can see my goal and blaze my own trail from there.
While it’s important to be willing to venture off into the unknown, the path less traveled — where you will venture to hit your goal — is still the unknown because you’ve never been on it before.
The path is the shortcut. Learning from others is the best way to achieve success because it saves you time, money, and pain. It will even shorten the learning curve of new concepts and ideas.
If you try to shortcut the shortcut, it can be many times more dangerous. There may be loose rocks, wild animals, or a dead end. There’s a reason the path wasn’t built in that direction in the first place.
Don’t become impatient with the journey and try to veer off the given course. Impatience will take you out. Stick to your goals. The shortcut may look shorter and more appealing, but in the end, it will end up taking a lot of time to achieve your goals.
If you stray or let what “looks appealing” take you off course, it will take you longer to get there, and you’ll most likely endure more trials and bumps along the way. You may not even get there at all because frustration and doubt will infiltrate your mind.
We need to keep blinders on and focus on the path in front of us to get to the summit, our end goal. Don’t let distractions take you out. Enjoy the views, enjoy the journey, but stay on the path.
As long as you can see the path in front of you, don’t quit. If you see a path in front of you, you can be reassured that you can reach your destination because someone else has already paved the way.
God is no respecter of persons. If someone else can do it, you can do it too. You just need to believe that you can.
The path of the warrior is lifelong, and mastery is often simply staying on the path.
— Richard Strozzi-Heckler, American Coach and Author
5 Best Ways to Learn from Other People’s Experiences
We often think learning is only done in a classroom or school set-up. But learning never stops. Our personal experiences matter but one of the important ways we learn is through others’ experiences.
We need to be willing to learn from others, to sit at their feet and find out what they know. This is our shortcut! Many times we don’t have to reinvent the wheel or make the mistakes others have made.
We can take our goal and find a few others who have hit a similar one, and we can study what they did. We can learn what worked and what didn’t work for them.
They become our mentors of sorts through books, podcasts, associations, and maybe even personal relationships. If the path is already blazed, why wouldn’t we at least start there?
With that said, these are the 5 Best Ways to Learn from Other People’s Experiences. Let’s dive in!
Be humble
The first thing you need to know is that even the most successful person you know can learn something from someone else. At the end of the day, no one knows everything.
When you are open-minded and humble, you can learn from anyone. It can be your children, your peers, your friends, a colleague, and even an employee. Engage even with those who have a different perspective from yours. Understand things from their point of view and you could learn a thing or two.
You don’t have to acquire knowledge on your own. It’s the collaboration and sharing of ideas and strategies that make learning rich and beneficial.
Genuinely get to know people around you
Grab someone in your circle that you admire, an expert in your area of work, or a thought leader. You can take them to lunch or coffee and be genuinely interested in knowing them and their life experience.
Be curious and ask them questions. Ask them how they overcame obstacles and challenges. Be polite, regularly nod, keep eye contact, and write down notes in a journal if you have one so you can remember what they say.
You’ll know what to avoid and what to repeat. You can learn how to be an entrepreneur through the stories of mentors’ successes and failures. Conversations with small business owners about how they work can teach you how to implement the right systems for success.
You’ll find that the new perspectives you learn will equip you to run the race of life and actually win.
Observe what other people do and imitate them
One of the ways sports coaches learn about their competitors’ moves and strategies is by observing what they do and how they play. Observation is one of the best ways to learn.
You can take notes of the habits of successful people around you, online or on social media, and implement them in your own life to get the same results you desire. You can also listen to podcasts where people share their recent experiences on a matter.
Just remember, you may need to make some adjustments to their plans and actions based on your own needs and circumstances.
Ask for help
Are you stuck with your goals or frustrated because you’ve hit a roadblock? Reach out to a mentor or coach and ask for help.
Notice those who are great at what you’re trying to do and ask them for their advice. Why reinvent the wheel when you can learn from those who’ve walked the road before you?
Learn from the past
Read about the history and autobiographies of people in your line of work. Ask those you admire what failures they had and what life lessons they learned.
Instead of attempting things and learning the hard way that they don’t work, taking the past into account often leads us to have future success.
Next time you have a challenge you need to solve, can go about things in a different way because of the insights you’ve gained from others’ experiences.
Stay on the Tracks, Tootle!
My oldest son’s favorite book when he was younger was a Golden Classic called, Tootle. We read it over and over again to him, multiple times a day. We even had to hide it at times so we could read other books to him!
Tootle is a baby locomotive who hopes to grow up to be the Flyer on the New York-Chicago route. All he had to do was stop at red flags waving, pull a dining car without spilling soup, and get 100 percent A plus on staying on the rails, no matter what.
However, Tootle thought it was much more fun to venture off the tracks and chase butterflies in the meadow, and he did this frequently.
What he didn’t realize was that Bill, his school teacher, had Tootle’s best interest in mind. If Tootle wanted to be the fastest train and be a Flyer on the New York-Chicago route, he needed to stay focused and stay on the path paved for him — no matter what.
Tootle learned the hard way why it was important to listen to his coach and not stray from the tracks.
Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to. Learn from others and stay on your path. Let other people’s experience be your best teacher.
How you get there may look different and unique to you based on your goals and the obstacles along the way, but you can get there faster if you stay the course on the trail already blazed for you.
Even if you’re the most successful person in the room you can always learn from those around you.
The 5 Best Ways to Learn from Other People’s Experiences is to be humble, genuinely get to know people around you, observe and imitate what they do, ask for help, and learn from the past.
These practical strategies will lead you to become wiser, save your time, and inspire you. They will surely set you up for success too.
And, remember, you are a winner. Just run your race!
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