Mastering the art of learning

'Life experience' is crucial for people to build a successful and happy life. Experience facilitates better decision-making and more effective application to increase the rate of success.

Rather than learning life experience through your own trials and wild attempts, it is wiser, easier and less costly to learn through others' experience. Individually you have limited opportunities to learn.

You have heard the saying, 'Experience is your best teacher'. If you wait to learn only from experience, it's only one teacher you can learn from, whereas if you develop the habit of learning from others too, then you have more than one teacher to learn from which facilitates faster learning and also gives you a much broader perspective.

Although this kind of experience may not be as pure as the one you will experience yourself, it is quite useful given that each person has limited opportunities of his own. Mixing and matching your own experience with the learned experience of others around you can make you an accurate judge. Observe others and reflect on your own.

Typically, you have to wait for regular life events to gain experience of your own. Your life experience is full of failures and successes. You can learn from mistakes to prevent it recurring and reproduce success more frequently for repeated benefits.

Sometimes you have to embrace life and then conquer it to gain that particular life experience. In the quest of learning, other people's success and mistakes is the perfect case to study on. We learn a lot through the trials and journeys of others and our mind can simulate the words and actions from those scenarios and outcomes.

Looking at the past can help find the answers to your future. It's important to remember the consequences of different actions in the past. The principle is that everything else being constant, you are sure to have the same result by repeating the same action.

Learn life experience through others by observation and yourself by reflection. Failure due to lack of experience is an absolutely inexcusable. The consumer is common in many instances for a variety of products and services. Attitudes, behaviour, desires and the way the consumers respond to various strategies and offers can be the same.

Identification of common buyer behaviour and learning from the experiences of other businesses and marketeers can reduce research and experiment cost and the time spent. While learning is an important aspect for business success, cost of failure is an absolute waste. You can improve your business learning curve by carefully analyzing data from those who've already 'been there and done that'. You can learn from their experience - whether that experience is good or bad.

Learning from others

Learning from others' experience can be applied to buying products or acquiring anything you want; everything from bread to an automobile, choosing a career, becoming successful in business, selecting a marriage partner or raising children.

For a business; which media mix is the best for a premium priced consumer brand? How does the common consumer respond to a discount promotion? You can benefit from others' experience in any area - eating healthy, doing studies, taking a vacation, buying or selling your home, being happy or creating a life of abundance and wealth.

It's not about learning from role models but from common people. Why not give it a try and start mastering the art of learning from others' experience the next time you have an important purchase or an exciting adventure in front of you?