A difficult fact of life is that experiencing something doesn’t make you an expert on it. Even experiencing it a lot – even experiencing it more than someone who is, in fact, an expert.
Getting shot doesn’t make you a ballistics expert.
When we suffer, we look for all sorts of ways to justify that suffering. Nobody likes feeling victimized. Nobody likes feeling like they’ve wasted their time, either. So if you get mugged, it’s perfectly natural for your mind to want to create some positive as a result, and often that positive looks something like your brain saying “Well hey, at least I’m now an expert on crime, street smart and savvy. Won’t happen again, and I can tell others how to avoid it, too.” And if you spend ten years doing something that you didn’t like doing, like a job you hated, you at least want to be able to say that you’re good at it!
Experience isn’t nothing, of course. You learn something from everything you do. But it’s only one way to learn, and it’s not always the best way, and not everything you learn from experience is even correct. But again, that’s a hard pill to swallow. If you get mugged, and in response you form certain very strong views on crime, and then someone tries to tell you that not only did you get mugged, but as a result you became more wrong about how, why, and where crime happens than you were before? You feel victimized all over again. Most brains will do a lot to not feel that way, including being very stubborn about what they think they know.
When something bad happens to you, there’s definitely opportunity for growth. I truly do view every experience as such an opportunity! But you have to be very deliberate about what you learn. Don’t let it become a door for new biases to enter through. Instead, let it be fertile soil for your emotional growth.
And whenever someone voices an opinion to you that is clearly based on their own traumatic event, be graceful – and don’t expect any good results from trying to change their mind.
The Opportunity Machine 