Experience Co-exists With Reading
Reading Time: 2 minutes
"I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.”
- Confucius
I learnt the most I’ve ever learnt in 2023 - through a combination of lived experience and reading. Both of which are exceptionally important for learning.
One of my best learnings about learning: understanding something depends on both experience and reading - one is not enough without the other.
You never know what something is like until you experience it. Ideas we read about are often not novel, and instead reimagined through a different perspective, inviting us to see the world in a different way.
I only started reading more avidly this year, and I was initially kicking myself over how much I could’ve learnt earlier. And then I realised - I don’t really regret not reading books earlier as a kid, because I wouldn’t have understood them without experience.
“Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.” - Arthur Koestler
Some Examples
My mum always says that we can only live the life of one person, but through understanding others’ perspectives, we can gain the most important insights from their lives: what motivates them, how they adopt new skills, and how they approach challenging decisions
I met a person who was incredibly well read and intelligent this year, and in our extensive conversations, that person recommended me some books. They were so well read that I’m only just getting to them, half a year later.
While I conversed with this person (and while I’m reading now), I realised that I understand and preach a lot of these concepts already. Not that I’m not learning, but I’ve realised that reading can only get you so far. I could relate with this highly intelligent person so much, based on my lived experience, and it sort of goes to show how experience trumps all else.
Thinking without doing is nothing.
When I was at the gym, another one of my friends who was an avid reader noted that even though “you haven’t read many books, you have all the juice.”
When he asked me how, I replied that I think I knew what I knew from both thinking and doing - my learning is through thinking about my experience and that introspection has led me to know quite a few concepts written about in books. Thinking without doing is nothing, doing without thinking is nothing.
The Best Books
One more friend, more than five years older than me, had a chat with me about how philosophy is learnt through experience, and not through reading.
The best philosophical books (eg Siddhartha; see Favourites) relate insights with personal experience, inviting us to critically consider how we have internalised these learnings.
Work is a Vector
The reading you do determines the direction that you work in.
The experience you gain determines the magnitude, that is, how far you go in that field.
Both must co-exist for quality work to be done.
Regulating Consumption - an ‘Information Diet’
Another friend of mine I met through a mutual friend, who I still regularly chat with on Discord. And he mentioned similar things.
We discussed how there are probably human limits to how much we can consume and we need to regulate it in order to be able to internalise learnings.
There also needs to be a balance between thinking and doing - thinking without doing leads to sitting in your room all day, and doing without thinking is aimless.
“Life is a classroom. Experience is a teacher.”
Understanding requires experience, not merely belief. Reflecting on experience helps us internalise learnings, as we have personal contexts that we hold dear to our hearts.
"The teacher learns more than the student.
The author learns more than the reader.
The speaker learns more than the attendee.
The way to learn is by doing."
– James Clear
I think the best example I can present of both reading and experiencing is from reading about finding meaning and purpose in life - Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was an incredible read, and is really well sum up by one quote, I think.
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked.”
Human beings set purpose for ourselves, and I could really relate from my experiences finding myself ‘bored’ in my spare time - I felt like there was no meaning with how I was spending my days, and through going to the gym a few times, journaling up my thoughts, I came to the same conclusion as Frankl. We all self-prescribe our own senses of meaning and purpose in our lives.
Now, my personal experience could really viscerally touch me, and it was only reshaped and deepened by reading about Frankl’s time in a concentration camp.
In order to fully understand a concept, you have to experience and read about it - there are no shortcuts.
“You prefer real figs to painted ones, so why not true and natural deeds to written ones?”
- Michel De Montaigne
Yurui
