by Jessica Tanner

Created on: November 06, 2009   Last Updated: December 02, 2009

The relationship between wisdom and experience is expressed in different sayings. Some say, live and learn while others quote with age comes wisdom. Is wisdom just something that one has or is it a combination of knowledge and experience? Can one expect to only acquire wisdom at a ripe old age? There are steps one can take to maximize learning from experience and understanding the implications of choices and how to apply these lessons to life. These lessons in life can be learned from personal mistakes, learning the hard way or learning from others.

Learn from Personal Mistakes

Personal life experiences are an incredible teaching tool if one chooses to learn from mistakes. As a child you may have called another child a bad name. This probably hurt the other child's feelings and you received a punishment from a parent or a teacher as a consequence. From this point on in your life you had a choice. You could learn from your mistake that it did not feel good to hurt someone else and that when you did hurt someone else there was a penalty. The other option is to ignore that experience and see if turns out differently next time. Chances are the next time the same result occurred. People are constantly testing their limits and repeating mistakes. Albert Einstein describes this as insanity, Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

In childhood you may have also been told to do unto others as you would like to have done unto you. This also plays into learning from your mistakes. If you called that child a name and realized the pain it caused them, you may have understood that you would not like it if someone did that to you. Empathy is the capability to share and understand another's emotions and feelings. It is often characterized as the ability to "put oneself into another's shoes". Wisdom is gained in these experiences and it begins even in early childhood. The difficult part is choosing to learn from the experiences and not repeating the same mistakes expecting different results.

Learning the Hard Way

It is interesting that each individual can learn the easy way or the hard way. Judging by the name, The Easy Way, seems like the path to take, yet far more choose to avoid it. If you were lost and walking through the forest and you suddenly stumbled upon a sign pointing in two directions, one pointing towards the easy way home and the other pointing towards the hard way home, which would you choose? In that

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