Learn From The Wisdom Of Those Who Have Experience

“When you are willing to listen and learn, some of life’s most meaningful teachings come from those who have gone before you. They have walked where you are walking and have experienced many of the things you are experiencing. If you listen and respond to their counsel, they can help guide you toward choices that will be for your benefit and blessing and steer you away from decisions that can destroy you.”  – M. Russell Ballard

You can learn good judgment through your own personal trial and error, which is certainly an effective way to learn.  Effective? Yes. Painful? For sure.  Efficient? Absolutely not!

The most efficient way to learn is to learn from the mistakes made by others. If you are willing to seek counsel from those who have been there, done it, and who have clearly learned from their own mistakes, you can save yourself a whole lot of time and so so so much pain.

I benefited greatly in my life by being around people who openly shared their mistakes and the lessons their mistakes had taught them. I can’t tell you how much hearing and then heeding their wisdom contributed to my overall success in life. And having benefited from that so significantly is what motivated me to start openly sharing the lessons I was learning in my life too – I want to pay forward what was done for me – and frankly I don’t want anyone to ever go through the pains of making any of the mistakes I had to suffer from if those can be avoided because I was willing to share.

Learn from the experiences of others who have gone before you. That doesn’t mean you have to follow their exact path in life, but you can surely apply all the lessons they learned as you are traveling your own unique one.

~Amy Rees Anderson    (read Amy’s new book “What AWESOME Looks Like: How To Excel In Business & Life” )

2 Comments

  • Collette Wixom-Call says:

    Great thoughts, Amy. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on working on inspiring a culture of transparency and openness. I too have benefited greatly from others who have the courage to share and be open about their mistakes, but have found that this notion of admitting infallibilities is not shared by all…or even many. What a shame, given that we all have them and we can all learn and become better if we do share. What can we do to inspire this as a part of our work cultures?

  • Meenal Garia says:

    It’s just amazing thank you for writing these great posts

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