We take experience too seriously. When the truth is we don’t even know what it means. Experience, in itself, means nothing. Having twenty years of experience doing the same thing is slow numbness. An anaesthesia for life.
What we get wrong about experience is that it is never about one skill. It’s about everyday living. It’s the experience of understanding yourself. Naturally, it’s a measure for yourself, not for anyone else.
How many years of experience you have is an asinine question. This question may help know if you will avoid some basic mistakes. Beyond that, it’s a recipe for stagnation. It creates insignificance, over and over again.
Living the same experience every year for twenty years is not twenty years of experience. It’s one year experienced twenty times.
This sort of long-ass experience is not a virtue. It only stifles creativity. Great ideas don’t come to the most experienced. It comes to those that are willing to try new experiences.
Experience is a trench 99% of the world operates in. The remaining 1% make art. Experience may have helped humanity survive. But what helped us flourish is art, emotions and ideas.
The one message every philosopher left for the world is that real knowledge is not information, but experience. Forget the fact that it took them a thousand books to arrive at this conclusion. Real experiences are found in nature and outside the device on which you are reading this.
It’s about time we stopped going batty about the years of experience. Value people’s opinions on logic and reasoning.
Having years of experience does not make ideas better or the reasoning strong. If anything, it only makes everything boring and difficult. Experience chokes profundity. It’s a veil which when removed make you feel very stupid about your own naivete and unintelligence.
Real Experiences teach you how wrong you are over and over again. If they are only validating how cool and right you are all the time, you will turn into the ass in the world’s pain.
Respect should not be an outcome of experience. It should be an outcome of basic equality and kindness. The only thing that must be an outcome of experience are great lessons. Not decisions, positions or the license to be an oppressive assole.
Experience is personal enlightenment. It’s never paraded about like a badge of honour. It’s a promise with yourself to make the most of the time you have. Keeping your promise is all that matters. In the end, it’s the only validation you will need.
Meditations 