(Photo Credit: Lord Bovey)

I’ve been toying with this notion for awhile… we all know a great precursor to success comes with experience. Just look at sports, as you age and your body slows, experience becomes a large influence. But in it comes something I don’t think is properly assessed and considered. I agree wholeheartedly that gaining experience is part of the content of life but that doesn’t represent the framework. When I mean content, I mean that it plays a role in the larger picture, but with just the content and no framework, you can’t properly apply your experience.

Gaining experience is probably the easiest thing to do. It doesn’t really require any intelligence or thought, let your guard down and in itself you will become “experienced” in one way or another. Not every experience you come across in your lifetime will have some significant bearing on your life. But on that same note, I am very certain that many experiences do have that so-called silver lining. It’s not some cliche bullshit, but it just takes some progressive thinking and legwork to find it.

Part of the challenge with experience is being able to analytically breakdown down the event. That is, taking more than one perspective beyond just your own perspective… take the vantage point of one who is influenced by emotion (of various angles) and of objectivity. From there you have to pull and filter the transpirations and figure out what is something that is relevant to you yourself or something that you can apply to my own way of thinking.

The image above best reflects that, the silt and dirt in the pan represents the experience, but filtering it and sifting it unveils the nuggets (probably more likely flakes) of gold that you can hopefully embody and integrate into your own perspectives.

Now lies the difficulty, I think that gaining experience is not hard as I mentioned. Merely being proactive and going out and “doing” will net you a shit load of experience. It’s as easy as letting go of inhibitions. Yet, proper analytical skills and the filtering of stimulus you’ll come across in your lifetime, you can’t really be taught that. That’s why some people never progress and never learn from their mistakes, or even let one mistake consume and ruin them. Although I don’t even know how the analysis and the skill of developing a greater set of decision-making tools actually works sometimes, maybe it really just is an extension of having an open mind. The open mind allows you to quickly piece things that you otherwise thought wouldn’t fit? Ok yeh, I like that conclusion, maybe I’ll run with that haha.

So the greater your “sifting” (filtration skills), the greater your ability to find the gold (the meaningful thought processes) to integrate into your life.

-Eugene