“Have You Learned Your Lesson Yet?!”

During the Holidays, together with family, often the conversation goes back to old memories. In one of these conversations, my Mom and Sister ganged up on me. They reminded me of the struggles my Dad and I had with my misbehavior.

It seemed, stupidly, I kept doing the same bad things, over and over. I kept making the same mistakes, I kept getting caught. My Dad would sit down with me, frustrated, talking about these things. “You keep doing the same things, you keep getting caught, have you learned your lesson yet?”

I finally figured out I hadn’t. Despite all the experiences, I was doing the same things over and over, still getting caught. Usually, in these “Have you learned your lesson, yet,” sessions, Dad would follow, asking lots of questions. “Why do you keep doing the same things and getting caught? Do you want to get caught? What if you changed?…….” We would talk through the experiences, what was happening, why, what I should change. He was very patient, slowly I corrected my behavior (Inevitably, I’d start doing other stupid things, Dad and I would go through another set of conversations….)

As I thought about these conversations, I realized the mistake we make with “experience(s).”

Whether personally or organizationally, we gain huge experience in our work. We go through hundreds of outreaches, conversations, meetings, deals. We may collect lots of data about these experiences. We “brag” about our extensive experience.

Mistakenly, we think it’s all about the volume of experience(s) we have. But the real secret is what we learn from these experiences. It’s taking the time to reflect back on the experiences, thinking about them. It’s understanding what they mean, what’s important in the experiences, what we can learn from the experiences. As my Dad did with me, it’s thinking about, “Why do we keep doing the same things? What might we change? How might we improve?”

Experience is just lots of activity. It is meaningless unless we take the time to reflect on these experiences, learning and growing as a result of them.

In these few days before the end of 2024, take some time to reflect on your experiences. Consider, “Have you learned your lesson?”

Afterword:  Below is the AI generated discussion of this post.  It’s interesting, they took this discussion in a slightly different direction than I intended, but the ensuing discussion is actually quite good.  Enjoy!