An important component of business and human progress is framing and acting on the lessons that are drawn from experience. While every approach to interpreting experience has its own strengths and weaknesses, I believe that the best approach is a process of structured reflection where we do not merely react to information based on intellectual and emotional habits but rather consider data and events from multiple perspectives.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Soren Kierkegaard

The Treasure of Experience

A good deal of philosophy can be reduced to the following maxim: central to a meaningful life is the process of reflection. It is through reflection that we withdraw from the rushing stream of the day’s events, see ourselves and the world around us with increased clarity and understanding and then return to life, in a sense, reborn.

Thought is the gateway to positive changes in who we are and what we do. Every person who goes through life, regardless of their birth, circumstances, appearance or personality is constantly handed a treasure chest of essentially infinite value: this treasure chest is called experience. This catalogue of our journey through life includes a clear and detailed record of life’s triumphs, long stretches with little change in scenery and difficult trials: what has worked, what has failed and the way forward to every goal.

This treasure chest of experience, however, can not simply be opened and its contents taken; experiences must first be interpreted in order to be converted into new paths and positive life changes. This small step to incredible riches, like crossing the mythical bridge of Bifrost that separates earth from heaven, is often extremely difficult to take.

Despite the fact that the ability to use experience is available to all, approaches to interpreting experience vary widely: for some people, their view of experience becomes a dead end that is very hard to escape while for others experience becomes an opportunity to completely transform their approach to life.

The Process of Reflection

The process of interpreting experience can be broadly divided into two approaches: reflection or reaction. Reflection has four key components.

The first component of reflection is space. In order to reflect on something we need a place for reflection be it a place of stillness, a walk or simply a quiet time in the day. Some space between what has occurred and how we interpret it is vital because without distance between experiencing and understanding the probability is high that our thoughts will simply become mirrors of events and we will assume that whatever affects us, regardless of how small, aberrant or isolated, must be reflective of the greater world.

For example, if we have a negative experience on a trip we may rush to the conclusion that all trips are negative without thinking through the factors that made the trip negative, how likely it is that those factors will apply in the future and what can reasonably be done to avoid those factors from affecting us again.

The second component of reflection is time. In order to consider a fact or event fully we first need to let it fall through our invariably changing states of mind until it becomes still enough so that it can be reasonably analyzed for what it is and what it is not. Angry thoughts can turn even the most benign events into a cause for further anger; kind thoughts can convert even the most negative facts into a cause for empathy and compassion. Like a coin whose shape is distorted as it falls through the water, we must first let facts and events settle on the bottom of the stream of our minds and hearts so that we can see them as clearly as possible.

The third component of reflection is the process of considering the significance of something that has occurred. This is difficult, as a single event can be interpreted in literally an infinite number of different ways. On the one hand, missing a bus could be considered a negative experience because it will delay our trip which may cause a number of undesired outcomes, including arriving late at a meeting or spending more time in the rain or cold. On the other hand, missing the bus may allow us to strike up a conversation with other people who are waiting for the bus, one of whom may become a lifelong friend or client.

Considering the significance of an event means realizing that it can be viewed in many different ways, recognizing that choices are often made as to which viewpoint is taken and rather than taking a particular viewpoint as a single truth, weighing that viewpoint’s advantages and disadvantages.

The fourth component of reflection is forming a view of a fact or event that will serve as the basis for future action. As part of this process, we should not simply accept the first view of a fact or event that comes to mind but rather make an effort to deliberately seek out alternative and even diametrically opposed perspectives. If we hear that a movie is good and our immediate reaction is to buy tickets to see it, we can ask ourselves “What are the five reasons why I should not see this movie?” This going back and forth between possibilities and the clash between opposing views often leads to a position which, while perhaps not absolutely correct, is more balanced and points to a wiser path of action.

The Process of Reaction

A second type of interpreting experience is simply reacting to events around us and allowing those reactions to serve as the basis for the actions we take in the future. There are several reasons why the trap of reactive thinking is easy to fall into.

The first reason is decision timetables. We live in a world that, if defined by the number of new events and bits of information that are added to it, moves at a speed of nearly incalculable velocity. If one takes the view that thinking and decision-making processes must keep up with how quickly data comes in to our lives, the amount of time allocated for decision-making becomes measured not in days, weeks or months but rather in nanoseconds.

Related to this is the fact that time tables for responding are often impossibly short of what is reasonably required. Commentators are expected to opine intelligently on information they have just heard, companies are expected to design intelligent strategies based on market movements they barely understand and governments are expected to build policy views without carefully analyzing the problem the policy is expected to solve. In this environment it is easy to view reflection as a luxury for which there is no time.

The second reason is mental habits. The human mind is simply incapable of processing the incredible amounts of information that are produced, modified and distributed every day. Due to this incapability, most people form the mental habit of taking selective parts of information and inserting them into a story about how the world works, how governments work or what people are like. The more this process is practiced, the quicker we become at extracting facts and events that support our mental story and the better we become at expanding the story and making reality fit it into it.

The problem with forcing reality into a pre-conceived story is that getting progressively better at it and more confident about its conclusions does not mean the story is getting closer to the truth; in fact it often means that the story is deviating farther and farther from it. Obviously this approach has very negative ramifications for any hopes of turning experience into something as useful as possible.

The third reason is emotional habits. In addition to thought habits, we also often develop increasingly rigid emotional responses to life’s events which pre-program us for progressively wider and less objective intellectual perspectives and responses. Anger at the fact that the bus comes late pre-sets our mind to be angry at all buses for not arriving on time and becoming angry when we see any real or potential facts that point to potential bus operating problems.

Once this emotional framework is hardwired into our brain, it is a very short step to convert our emotional predisposition to see the negative side of buses into a theory that buses are not a viable form of transportation and even that the entire transportation system should be dismantled. The wave of this thinking can irrationally and exponentially grow in force until the day the bus service is in fact suspended and we are forced to walk to work. Suffering this greater inconvenience, we may quickly abandon our earlier criticism of the bus system and become a passionate advocate for its reinstatement. Thus the wheel of emotion, thought and action begins to turn again.

Reflective vs. Reactive Thinking

It is easy to paint reactive forms of thinking as clearly inferior to reflective approaches, but there are arguments in favor of them. The first argument is that, first of all, reflection takes too long and bad decisions are better than those that are not timely.

The second argument is that, given the complexity of the world and imperfections in the human thought process, a process of internal reflection may not lead to perspectives that are materially better than those produced by reactive approaches. If this is true, it could be argued that it is better to make bad decisions and quickly change them in light of new circumstances and information rather than spend excessive amounts of time on decisions that will likely contain a significant degree of error.

While these arguments are not irrational, a key flaw in them is that decisions often put in motion events that are not easy to change and the cost of bad decisions and constantly changing course of action can be very high. Apart from the high economic costs of ill-advised decisions, if we only react to external events we become not the captain of our own ship but simply a raft that is thrown about by the currents of life.

Conclusion

The interpretation of experience is vital for the creation of a path forward to a better life. While there are different ways to interpret experience, proactively making time in our age of constant information noise for a structured process of reflection before making a decision and planning future action is an excellent way to increase our profit from the past and convert experiences into riches.