Slow Down! Stop Wasting Your Experiences
Slow down, reflect!
“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” — Peter Drucker
Experiences are priceless. Yet, many people pass up the opportunity to exploit the potential resident in their unique experiences. Meaningful insights resides within experience.
Reflection is the process of transforming experiences into insights in the refinery of the mind.
Insights elude us because we live on the fast lane. In the bid to become great and find our place, we breeze through life zealously, neglecting the raw material of our ingenuity — experiences.
Just like crude oil in its purest form, experiences are meaningless and of little relevance, until they are carefully extracted and purposefully refined.
When you reflect on your experiences, you’re instructing your mind to process the data you have provided in order to output useful information, in the form of insight.
Study the lives of the greats who have impacted the world significantly, and you will find that they spend a significant amount of time alone reflecting on their experiences and thinking.
Experiences form the bedrock of our education, which in turn inform our decisions and actions, ultimately crafting the portrait of our existence.
The greater percentage of our experiences in life are free, yet experiences are expensive. You choose to learn the hard way when you trivialize too many expensive experiences that gave you cheap platforms to learn.
Here are two ways you can exploit your experiences:
- By careful contemplation — the cradle of insights is contemplation.
“Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing.” — Dodie Smith
- Being inquisitive — this is a healthy desire to see beyond the obvious.
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” — Albert Einstein
Experience isn’t the best teacher; evaluated experience is.
We ought to slow down and consciously commit to evaluating and transforming our experiences into insights in the inmost depths of our being.
