Is experience always the best teacher?

Life has many ups and downs, and the reason why things get mixed up in the journey of life is to make you smarter as you get older.  And of course, the ‘ride’ won’t be smooth because we all make mistakes at some point, which sometimes could be as a result of our own carelessness […]

Life has many ups and downs, and the reason why things get mixed up in the journey of life is to make you smarter as you get older.  And of course, the ‘ride’ won’t be smooth because we all make mistakes at some point, which sometimes could be as a result of our own carelessness and at other times, it could be from others. Whatever the case, there would be lessons to learn. These lessons can be termed as ‘experiences’.
Is the cliché ‘Experience is the best teacher’ true? Why do so many believe in it? Let’s consider what it means. Categorizing it as a proverb, the free dictionary.com says further “You will learn more from things that happen to you in real life than you will from hearing about or studying things that happen to other people.”
With this in mind, Lifextra talked to a few people on the topic. Lagos-based engineer Michael Agbor certainly agrees with the cliché. He said, “Experience is a good teacher. When a bad event happens and we learn from it, then we are being reactive and we’ll know that it’s a dangerous ground to thread on.”
“Today’s businesses such as engineering, accounting project future danger. Therefore, we can avoid ill experience by being proactive.” He concluded with a rhetoric question, “What will a captain tell his crew members after a crash?”
Hannu Afere, a writer, cites an experience. “The first thing that pops into my head is this story. One day, when I was about five years old, my father was ironing his clothes. He went inside to fetch something but before he left, he asked me not to go near the iron and I promised not to. I didn’t know why, maybe I was curious but as soon as he left, I crept towards the iron, raised it and as I was inspecting it…, bam! It slipped and burnt me. To this day, I have the scar on my chest. After that incident, I never went near an iron. So in my case, I can say that yes experience is the best teacher.”
TJ Benson, a young Abuja-based writer, noted that experiences can be limitations “especially if you’ve had a bad one. The terrible experience of meeting strangers might stop you from meeting the love of your life. In another angle, people like to think that only ‘experienced’ people can succeed.”
Speaking further on how he found the above statement to be untrue, he cited an example “Christopher Paolini at sixteen with no creative writing experience wrote Eragon which became a world best seller.”
Emmanuel Azu, who works with a financial institution, thinks that one doesn’t always have to learn from experience “except if you like to learn the hard way”. He said “We hear stories of people who suffer the consequences of certain actions. You may not want to take a similar action.”
Azu also stated that keeping an open mind, continuously seeking knowledge and applying such knowledge with wisdom would profit anyone better than experience.