There are clichés that may not be true. Let me give you some of them.
“Practice makes perfect.” Not necessarily true.
Practice makes permanent. This is true. Ask any golfer. If you have a defective golf swing and you practice it constantly then you will be permanently defective.
Experience is the best teacher. Not necessarily true.
Only evaluated experience teaches best. Many people continue doing the same mistakes not because they are lacking in experiencing but simply because they never evaluated their experiences.
Experience is not the same as education.
There are many educated people without experiences and they make poor teachers and instructors. And then again there are many experienced people without education and they are prevented from rising to higher levels of performance.
I have heard people say, “I do not have to finish school. I will get a job for isn’t it that experience is more important than the education?”
Once in a while comes an undereducated person who hits the jackpot. Earns a lot of money due to his or her business acumen yet none of these people would ever encourage their children NOT to have good education.
What is the difference then between education and experience?
One wag says: Education is what you get from reading the small print. Experience is what you get from not reading it.
Experiences alone do not make one an expert.
There is a difference between experience and expertise. Simply repeating the same task over and over is no guarantee you will get better.
The repeated practice should be directed toward the improvement of your performance. And when the repeated performance is done correctly, prolonged, it produces a library of specialized knowledge. This is what makes a person an expert. His mind is a wide and deep storage of patterns he may use when the situation calls for it. Just like a chess grandmaster he or she sees four or even five moves ahead.
You and I can be an expert. If we seriously want to be one
Each and everyday offers opportunity for us to gain new experience. Our skills are developed from such but only if we extract meaning from each one. This is why lazy people will never become experts. They go for the routine and they love making shortcuts.
Lazy people’s favorite cliché of course is “The end justifies the means.”
And the moment they achieve their tiny goals, they rest.
Not so the people of drive and passion. They challenge the status quo. They long for new learning. They seek more education and they do different things. Not a moment is wasted. Not a single experience ignored. Every encounter is evaluated and then the meaning from which is extracted.
Overtime this person becomes an expert. He becomes a sage on stage. He now has a wide and deep storage of specialized knowledge and experiences and people marvel at his wisdom. And then the world brands him as an “Expert.”
So now that you have education, now that you have experience and now that you have become an expert what comes next?
Here is the most important of them all.
You need to build your character.
Many people were able to climb up the ladder of their success because of their expertise but fall down hard because of their lack of character. Do not fall into this trap. For after all, God is not concerned with your success as He is with your character.