Evaluate:  to determine the significance or quality of; assess

I applied my heart to what I observed and learned a lesson from what I saw. Proverbs 24:32

How many agree with this old saying?......"Experience is the best teacher."  The answer is NO.  Experience is a great teacher only if take the time to evaluate our experiences.

"Mindless activities create shallow thinking, while evaluated action broadens our perspective."

 

We can go through life at home, at work and in our preparation to be an official without any real sense of understanding whether our experience was right, wrong or indifferent.  The key is to observe, evaluate, learn and apply lessons.  Going back to evaluate our experiences is a very good use of our time.

Do you consider yourself an Employee or an Entrepreneur?  There is a big mindset difference between the two...................an employee sees failure as rejection; entrepreneur sees failure as correction.  Experiencing failure, for a successful entrepreneur is feedback, a way to learn and grow.  One of the greatest entrepreneur’s of our time, Bill Gates, said this….

It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

Now, the quote from the beginning should be changed to "Evaluated experience is the best teacher."  We draw lessons from the past only when we study it.  So, don't just accept experiences for what they are.  Study them; see what you learned, and how or what you would change going forward, if anything.

“What a person knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is not the knowledge of formulas or forms of words, but of people, places, actions—a knowledge gained by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love—the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and of other men.”

~ Adlai Stevenson, former Governor of Illinois and two-time Democratic nominee for President of the United States