I read in their book, The Laws of Lifetime Growth, authors Dan Sullivan and Catherine Nomura explain, “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 experience into new lessons, you’ll make each day of your life a source of growth. The smartest people are those who can transform even the smallest events or situation 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.”
I love the old Peanuts cartoons. In one, Charles Schultz showed Charlie Brown at the beach. He was building a magnificent sandcastle. It’s a work of art! As Charlie stands back to admire his finished product, a huge wave rolls in and destroys his masterpiece. In the last frame he says, “There must be a lesson here, but for the life of me I don’t know what it is.”
That’s how we often feel after a potentially disasterous experience. We go through it but we don’t grow! We attend meetings to help us or read books to find advice— then do nothing with what we’ve heard. Don’t get excited about a learning event— get excited about learning from it! We haven’t really learned until we’ve applied it to our lives.
A few days after slaying a lion, Samson returned to the scene of his conquest and discovered 2 things in the carcass: 1) Bees— that sting. and 2) Honey— that tastes sweet. The Bible says, “and he took thereof.” In life, we need to move beyond the pain and look for the honey.“
Thank you for this. I sent this post to my wife. Going through some hard times and I have been trying to say this to her for awhile.