Law Two

Always Make Your Learning Greater Than Your Experience

Continual learning is essential for lifetime growth. You can have a great deal of experience and be no smarter for all the things you’ve done, seen, and heard. Experience alone is no guarantee of lifetime growth. But if you regularly transform your experiences into new lessons, you will make each day of your life a source of growth. The smartest people are those who can transform even the smallest events or situations into breakthroughs in thinking and action. Look at all of life as a school and every experience as a lesson, and your learning will always be greater than your experience.

Our ability to learn continually is what enables us to always have a future that’s bigger than the past. There is a method to doing this. Every experience you’ve ever had has two parts to it: the things about the experience that worked and the things that didn’t work. By worked we mean that those parts of the experience moved you forward, adding to your sense of capability and confidence. By didn’t work we mean the opposite: those aspects of the experience blocked or undermined your sense of capability and confidence.

Once you identify these two aspects of every experience, you begin to become aware of new ways to maximize what worked and to bypass or eliminate what didn’t. New insights, wisdom, and better, more effective ways of taking action become possible. In the process, the experience is transformed into a source of growth and gains new positive meaning.

Big Learning from a Small Experience

Even a small experience has the potential to be a source of major learning. Catherine shares this example:

I was coming home from my father’s house after a dinner. He had given me lots of wonderful leftovers to bring home, as well as my old microwave oven, which he’d borrowed, and a light fixture to try in place of a broken one in the house I had just moved into. It was late and I was tired. I looked at all the stuff in my trunk and thought that I could carry all this in one load. So I piled the fixture on top of the microwave, which was quite heavy but manageable for a short distance, and hung two bags of food on each wrist. Standing beside my car, I was quite proud of myself. Then I realized that I still had to close the trunk.

Bringing one knee up to support the microwave, I freed the hand closest to the car to push down on the trunk lid but misjudged my ability to maneuver with the weight of the bags hanging on my wrist. The lid came down quickly with a thud and latched. Sickeningly, I realized that my finger was caught in it. As the pain began to register, I realized that I would have to drop the microwave in order to free myself. Standing on one leg, there was no elegant way to do this. The light fixture hit the ground with a crash, and broken glass sprayed everywhere. It was like a scene from an old slapstick comedy. I couldn’t have choreographed it better if I were Buster Keaton. Thankfully, my key fob with its button that opens the trunk was in my pocket, or I could have been stuck there for a long time.

I managed to extricate myself, and my finger, though red and throbbing, was OK. The falling microwave had left a big white gouge in the side of my car and a hole in the front of my brand new jeans. I felt incredibly stupid—busted for doing something dumb—and I was mad at myself. What had made me think this was a good idea? Then I began to think, “OK, this is ridiculous. What is the universe trying to teach me here?” And some very wise words that I had heard from my friend Edward Brown, a Zen priest, came into my head: “Carry one thing with two hands, rather than two things with one hand.” It couldn’t have been more literally true. I immediately saw what was not working.

In that moment, I realized that I’d been doing things like this all my life, and that I’d actually been lucky to have evaded disaster until now, albeit narrowly a few times. A grin began to creep across my face. Time to change my habits.

Besides the damage to my car, which I couldn’t bring myself to pay to have fixed, I had a blackened fingernail for a month as a constant reminder every time I was tempted to take on too much. Yet my overall feeling was one of gratitude. After all, the lesson could have come when I was driving on the highway, talking on my cell phone, and eating a Popsicle: it could have been much worse. I don’t do things like that anymore. What worked about the experience was that it woke me up to a bad habit that was putting me in harm’s way.

Now I try to pay more attention to doing one thing at a time and giving myself permission to take a little longer. I’ve learned to say no when I need to and to delegate better. I’m much less stressed, and, oddly, I actually seem to get just as much done. Not juggling so many things at once has allowed me to do a better job at what really matters and to see possibilities that I was too distracted to notice before. This very unglamorous experience, as soon as I looked at it in terms of what worked and what didn’t, taught me a lesson that has helped me to improve my habits and my results.

It may have also saved my life. A couple of years later, I was driving through an intersection in that same car, looking straight ahead, though there were no cars in front of me, when just out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something large coming straight at me much too fast. Instinctively, I stepped on the gas, lurched forward, and braced myself as it crushed the back of my rear quarter panel — the one with the gouge from the microwave still in it. I was shaken but uninjured. It turned out that an elderly man with poor eyesight had run a stop sign at high speed. He didn’t even see me. If I had been the least bit distracted at that moment, his huge 1970s American car, which escaped unscathed, would have t-boned my little sedan right in the drivers’ side door. Immediately, I felt like I’d passed some kind of test, like the universe was saying, “Okay, we know you got the lesson. Now we’ll fix your car for free (through insurance) because you don’t need the reminder anymore.” It was kind of perfect. Dramatic, but perfect.

The Choice to Learn

You don’t get to choose all the experiences you have, but you do get to choose what to do with them. You can use them as excuses, wear them as badges of honor, make them emotional triggers for when you want to go on a good rant or have a good cry, or bury them like skeletons, which always seem to resurface later. These choices do not help you to grow. Or you can use them as raw material for learning, harnessing the emotional energy behind them to drive you to make good use of their lessons.

Sometimes, remarkable innovations can come from this kind of learning, as in the case of Mary Anne Ehlert. Mary Anne grew up with a sister who suffered from cerebral palsy. While other families went out for dinner and on vacations, Mary Anne’s family stayed home and took turns looking after Marcia, who required constant care. Marcia’s parents devoted their lives to her care and felt guilty that they couldn’t offer their other children a more normal upbringing.

As in any family that has a child with special needs, everyone was impacted. Mary Anne decided that if her friends couldn’t accept Marcia, they wouldn’t be her friends. She learned how to control Marcia’s seizures and helped with whatever new treatments her parents had decided to try. Mary Anne was always especially close to Marcia. She credits Marcia with having taught her to say what she felt and for teaching the whole family that “it’s about more than just stuff.” Her family always remained close, despite the strain, and her parents stayed together, beating the odds of an 85 percent divorce rate for parents of children with special needs.

After a 20-year career in banking, which she left when her position required her to lay off 1,500 people in two days, Mary Anne decided to become a financial advisor specializing in retirement and estate planning. In this context she asked her parents how they had provided for Marcia. She discovered their greatest fear was that her sister would be left alone if something were to happen to them. Mary Anne began to look for solutions for them and quickly realized that the need went far beyond her own family. Initially drawing on her experience in the world of financial products, she began to seek out innovative solutions that would protect her sister and restore her parents’ confidence and sense of control. From her experience with Marcia, Mary Anne had a unique understanding of the kinds of things families like hers faced and where the potential dangers lay—issues that started with, but went far beyond, financial planning.

Soon, she and her team were providing the Process for Protected Tomorrows^††, which encompasses a whole array of services that address the needs of both the family and the child with disabilities on many different levels. Because of her personal experience, she is able to speak very candidly to families in this situation, cutting through the denial that is so common and providing support with genuine empathy and a depth of insight and understanding that would be difficult for someone who hadn’t been in their shoes. The Process for Protected Tomorrows continues to evolve as Mary Anne and her team seek out new ways to improve the lives and prospects of the families she deals with.

While some people might have dealt with a childhood like Mary Anne’s by trying to “get over it” and “move on,” Mary Anne chose to use her experience to create something extraordinary. By using her understanding of what worked (the love, the devotion, and the learning that Marcia brought to their lives) and what didn’t work (the stress, fear, uncertainty, and sacrifice) in her family, she was able to develop solutions to improve the experiences of other families dealing with special needs. She is making a powerful contribution where there is a great need, and in the process she has also created a unique, thriving business with limitless growth potential.

Your own experience is rich with learning opportunities that you will see if you’re looking for them. Transform your experiences into lessons, and you’ll never feel world-weary or disadvantaged by your past. Instead, each lesson will provide the foundation for better experiences in the future.

Where Do I Start?

  Transform your experiences. Focus on an experience. Try to pick a specific situation like “today’s conversation with Joan” rather than a broader, less easily defined collection of events like “my relationship with Joan.” You might pick one that still has an emotional impact when you think about it. There’s good energy to drive transformation in those feelings. Think about what worked and what didn’t work in the situation. You might want to write everything down. Then think about what you could do to create a better outcome next time, and use that learning to move ahead.

  Change the conversation. One way to gauge if you’re focused on learning or experience is to listen to yourself talking. Are you more eager to share your experience, or to listen and learn? Do you share to be heard or to move the conversation forward? Notice how you feel around people who tell the same stories over and over. Do you talk about what happened to you, or what you learned from what happened to you? Is your experience the starting point or the ending point of the conversation? Pay attention to the stories you repeat, especially if you’re simply relaying your experience. Some of those situations may be candidates for the exercise above. Once you’ve got the learning out of an experience, the compulsion to talk about it repeatedly generally disappears.

  Finish this book and do the exercise at the end. We know this is only Law Two, but it’s a short book! The exercise at the end, called The Growth Focuser, will step you through mining your recent experiences for growth nuggets, but you’ll need to understand all the laws to get the full benefit. This is an exercise you can do on a regular basis to develop your awareness of the choices you’re making day to day and how they affect your growth. Over time, as you begin to be more conscious of your thinking and to see it in terms of the laws, you’ll find yourself seizing more learning opportunities in the moment rather than repeating the same experience over and over unconsciously.