The power of sharing: experiences vs lessons.
There’s a difference between sharing experiences and sharing lessons.
All of us are drawn towards stories. Stories are the way to generate a variety of emotions in a person. They have the power to influence art, architecture, religion, as well as modern-day marketing strategies.
Products associated with a compelling story are able to have higher intrinsic value than those without one. As is evident by a study described by David JP Phillips in this Ted talk, stories have the power to drive human emotions to unimaginable heights. I am a big fan of David JP Phillips and his skills in storytelling.
There is something I have realized about this powerful tool of sharing. Whenever we share our experiences, we tell a story of how things went.
Such stories are filled with minute details and strong emotions of the experience. They have the power to take the listener in a world of imagination and creation way beyond reality.
This power of visualization enables all of us to enjoy the stories created by artists all around the world.
But not all stories are created equal. Some have a much stronger impact on us while others are regarded as boring.
I believe that as a listener, there are certain preconceived notions in all of us. We hear a lot of stories in the information age which makes us immune to certain stories and emotions.
Watching similar geopolitical crises (eg the NATO-Russian threats) or stories of successful young entrepreneurs has become too clichéd over time.
Similar cliches can also occur due to the way stories are told.
Every experience has two major components in it. One is the story and the other is the lessons.
The stories associated with an experience are much more interesting than merely the lessons from it. Stories have the power to make us feel what the storyteller felt.
While the lessons are just that, lessons. The lessons are important don’t take me wrong but they are clichés.
We hear the same lessons and learnings from different people one way or the other. That's why they become clichés.
The lessons of being cautious while on a lonely street, not eating anything from strangers, always managing your finances properly, or never trusting people with money (you might have received a completely different set of lessons from your friends and family) have all been turned into clichés.
These lessons are no fun to listen to again and again. But on the other end of the spectrum of experience sharing are the stories.
The more a person struggles in life, the more experience they have, and with more experiences comes more lessons and stories.
I have seen a lot of struggles in my life as well but I was not aware of this subtle difference between stories and lessons.
Stories are the source of connection in humans. They have the power to make us aware of our emotions to a level that makes us feel more human.
My unawareness didn't allow me to connect with the people around me to a deeper level and made me feel like there is something wrong with me.
What I was unable to grasp was my excessive emphasis on lessons rather than the stories of my life. Sharing merely the lessons makes your life so dull and lethargic that the people around you can sense the negativity and lack of life around you.
This similar idea has been shared by a lot of people in different forms.
This is what people mean when they say, enjoy the journey, not the destination. The destination is the lessons we learn but the journey is the story.
Once you complete the journey, you are bound to reach the destination, which in this scenario refers that if you share your story(the journey) correctly, people will already know that you learned the lessons(the destination) along the way.
Some people go beyond their experiences and extrapolate situations without the problems they faced. Such people have the ability not only to learn from their experiences, share engaging stories but at the same time thrive to improve the situation so that others don’t have to face the same problems as themselves.
These are the people we call visionaries and they are the ones who make our society grow.
Understanding such insights help you build a better worldview and respect each and every individual you encounter in your life.
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