Learning From The Experience Of Others

IF you have ever looked for a job, you will discover that all the positions you ever wanted required previous experience. But experience is acquired through making bad decisions.

Experience is a tough teacher, it gives you the test first and the lesson later. God looks for experienced help. That is to say God helps experienced people desiring divine visitation.

When you are working for Jehovah, He uses everything you have been through, seeing it as learned obedience, making you perfectly equipped to serve Him.

However, perspective changes every thing, especially when you learn to see your life through fresh eyes. Experience isn’t what happens to you, as much as what you do with what happens to you.

Which is why your pain and other people’s pain become someone else’s gain. Experience of others are kept in books, biographies and memoirs. Immediately you read them, they become part of your experience.

The saying: ‘‘Experience is the best teacher” isn’t correct. The correct statement is that evaluated experience, is the best teacher. It is what you do with your experience that matters.

Everyday you have the opportunity to record new experiences. With each page you gain more understanding. As you grow your notebook of experiences you fill it with observations.

The issue is that few of us make the best use of our notebooks. Some of us leave our notebooks closed, rarely going through them again. We rarely reflect on them and gain greater wisdom.

Reflection turns into insight, so that we not only live the experience, but learn from it. There are people with lots of knowledge but little understanding. They have the means but they do not understand what to do with their knowledge.

When 25 years go by, they don’t gain 25 years experience, they gain only one year of experience 25 times.

To win in life, you must turn your experience into wisdom. So slow down, wisdom is gleaned over time, not overnight. We all experience more than we understand. And experience enables you to recognize the mistake when you make it again.

Sadly, too much happens to us in life for us to be able to understand it all. No matter how smart you are, your understanding will never catch up with your experience. Which is why you must make the most of what you can understand.

Your attitude towards unplanned and unpleasant experiences determines your growth and the fulfillment of your life ambition. Life is full of unforeseen detours. Learn to turn such detours into delights.

Treat detours as special excursions and learning tours. Do not fight them or you will never learn their purpose. Later you will get back on track, becoming wiser and stronger.

Lack of experience is costly, but our greatest ignorance isn’t of what we have yet to learn, but of how little we really know. The arrogance of the young is the direct result of his ignorance of consequences. You cannot avoid making mistakes but you can avoid them, grow through them b y not making the same errors. The cost of experience is enormous.

You cannot gain experience without paying a price. You can only hope that the price isn’t greater than the value of the experience gained. Besides, you cannot determine the price until you have gained the experience.

However, it is tragic to pay the price for experience and not learn the lesson. Remember, evaluated experience lifts you above the crowd. Winners make it a practice to reflect on their experiences and learn from them.

A particular quality you need to overcome opposition is zeal. It is another word for passion. Zeal keeps you going when others are quitting. It pushes you through the toughest times and gives you energy you don’t know you possessed.

Opportunity cannot take the place of zeal. Opportunity can open the door, without zeal, you can’t make the most of your opportunities.

Knowledge cannot replace zeal. Some of the world’s worst leaders are the smartest, but some of the greatest, such as Abraham Lincoln, had very little formal education.

A resume may get you past the door but won’t secure you outstanding performance. Even talent won’t replace zeal. Many people with great talent who never achieve professional success.

Talent is like money, it only grown when you put it to work. You will never be successful without the help of others. But being surrounded by rich people doesn’t guarantee you success. Thus, zeal is the game-changer, it attracts the grace of God.

Our champion this week is Williem Einthoven, the Dutch physiologist who was awarded the 1924 Nobel prize for medicine for his discovery of the electrical properties of heart through the electrocardiograph, which he developed as a practical clinical instrument and an important tool in the diagnosis of heart disease.

Born in May 1860 in Java, Dutch East Indies, Einthoven graduated in medicine from the University of Utrecht and served as professor of physiology at the University of Leiden from 1886 until his death in 1927.

In 1903 he devised the first string galvanometer. With that he was able to measure changes by contractions of the heart and record them graphically.
He coined the term electrocardiogram for this process. From 1908 to 1913, he studied patterns of records of normal heart activity in order to gain precision in recognizing and interpreting deviations.

Einthoven continued to develop electrode arrangements and the present-day standard limb leads were originally described and used by him. He died on his work-bench in his office in 1927.