Knowledge Vs Experience

Why You Can’t Perfectly Predict Your Response To A New Experience.

Have you ever heard the saying, “experience is the best teacher”? I am certain a greater percentage of people have. What about “to be forewarned is to be forearmed”? Both quotes seem to point to the same thing, that the knowledge of something translates to better handling of that thing, or having a previous experience of something equips you with dealing with a similar situation more efficiently. 

Source: Shalom's WhatsApp Status

Last week, I saw something on a friend status that I sort of agreed with. She was talking about pain and growth and concluded that knowledge and experience are two different things.  And yeah they are. Knowledge is facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education, and experience is, practical contact with and observation of facts or events. The conflict she was trying to address from my point of reasoning is how people think they have more understanding of something because they know about it or how people believe they can act better when faced with a certain situation because they have a theoretical understanding of a particular thing, so they can’t possibly go wrong in that situation, as in this case pain. Maybe one day I am going to talk about pain and how a lot of people make claims they can’t prove when it comes down to it.

The truth in what she is saying is this, the theoretical knowledge of something is incomplete without the experience of the thing. You would all agree with me that; there is a difference between knowing how to make, let say, pancakes and making pancakes,  just as there is a difference between reading about heartbreak and experiencing it, and knowledge is incomplete without the experience of the said subject. The reason is this when it comes to an experience, there are a lot more unpredictable variables than the perfect, described or somewhat controlled variable involved in the theoretical aspect of that experience. 

Which brings me to my subtitle; why you can't predict your response to a new experience based on just the knowledge you have concerning it or based on your prior experiences? The answer as I have offered earlier is in the unknown variables like; what will the weather be, how your day is going to be while experiencing something new, how your state of mind is and maybe the very thing we can’t always predict in any circumstance is our emotional state. No one is certain that the next time something is going to happen to them, they are going to be happy or sad. We don’t know for a fact what our emotion is going to be, so we can’t perfectly predict what we are going to do when faced with a new experience. 

One of the things I have learnt to tell people when they ask me about hypothetical situations like, what would you do when you see this person again, is I don’t know. If I am happy I would probably smile, if I am sad I most likely will not, If I am angry, I might become a bit violent and so on. Although, I know myself well enough to know the things I would never do because of how out of character I consider them to be. It is a lot easier predicting the things we might not do in a given time frame, concerning a particular experience, based on the knowledge of ourselves and the said thing, than predicting our response to a new experience. And this is because these variables shape our experiences more than the knowledge of what we are going to encounter.

In all, what I am trying to say is this. The knowledge of a thing is good, but it is not something we can build predictions on, and expect it to be perfect at all times because a lot more shapes our experience and most of the time, these variables are out of our control. So whenever we relate with people and the way they deal with certain things, we should remember that we are only speculating what we would do if we are put in the same situation. 

Did you notice the subheading I added before going on with the post? I have decided to draw your attention to it because I am proud of myself for doing that, and also because it is something I have picked up from reading Dave’s newsletter. It gives me a basic idea of what to look forward to in each newsletter.

So, what do you think about that? Do leave a comment below, and you can send a message to theestherian@gmail.com.

Enjoy the rest of your week.

With Love,

The Estherian.