Humans learn best through experience, either personal experience or by relating to someone else’s experience. One of the great benefits of being human is that we get to feel things and rationalize whether or not we enjoy something or dislike it. It also gives us the opportunity to completely understand, not just the logical, scientific, process, but the emotional ones as well and how things affect each other and relate to each other. Being able to experience learning something new increases awareness and intellect. Generally, humans need confirmation or a feeling about something in order to make a decision about it and that includes learning experiences.
Being able to actually experience something for yourself gives you the ability to analyze, evaluate and come to a conclusion with whatever experience you are having at the time. Being able to relay something that you learn, directed at your own individuallity helps you with whatever purpose you are trying to achieve. Often times without the personal experience of doing and learning something for yourself, you can never fully comprehend or relate to others who have shared the same experience. Everyone wants to be able to understand others as well as have others understand them. Having the opportunity to learn something through an experience is extremely important for this validity of oneself and others. Many times, people are unable to accept that something is the way it is. Learning something through experience gives them the ability to see, know and fully understand how or why something works. Sometimes it is difficult to relate to things without this knowledge. After all it is easy for someone to tell you something, but unless you try it or see it for yourself, well, we all know how that goes.
How many times has someone told you “Try it, see for yourself”? I personally have heard this a lot. So what do I do? I try it, just to see if it is any different of a result for me. Everyone is always trying to figure things out. How things work, what to do, how to make it better and number one, how can I make this easier? Learning through experience gives us the knowledge to determine all of these things.
Imagine if you had invented a cheese grater, but never tried it. Without the experience of trying it, you would never know that unless you hold the handle just right, keep it stable and in the proper direction, you could grate yourself. You wouldn’t know unless you had the experience of doing it even just once. Products are often tested by letting others experience them personally. It leaves less room for error if you know what to expect and what dangers could arise or exist. Testing through personal experience allows for modifications based on those personal experience with the product. The same theory applies to doing something through personal experience. You get the chance to test things and modify them if needed or adapt to them.
Learning through personal experience is sometimes the only way a human can be taught some things. Like grabbing something hot even though you saw that it was just taken out of the oven. You get burned just once and you usually remember to wear an oven mitt the next time. In my case, sometimes it takes me experiencing something more than once, to fully understand that the situation is just not going to be any different the next time. We, as humans tend to test our learning experiences by doing things the same way twice and getting the same results both times or very similar result unless we learn from the experience and modify it or adapt to it in some way.
Because every single human is unique and relates to every situation differently, simple directions, explanations and written logic are simply not enough. It is important to note, what works best for one person, doesn’t always work for another and similar results can be achieved by many different methods. You just need to be able to experience what works best for you as an individual. Having the experience of failing while learning, creates new opportunity for change and new ideas as well. Without the opportunity of failure while learning, many inventions would not have been invented. Many new learning experiences are created through this process.
Being able to learn through human experience enlightens perspectives, creates new ideas, better more effective methods, and desirable results, emotionally, logically and physically. It also teaches important life lessons, like what NOT to do next time.
