4 Ways to Learn from Experience

There are at least four ways to learn from experience: experimenting, reflective critique, feedback and learning questions.

Experimenting is trying new things and common things in new ways. Experimenting yields far more learning than analysis paralysis and death by discussion.

Reflective critique extracts learning forward from any experiences on the success-failure continuum. Experience is only a teacher when we reflect back from it.

Feedback is discovering how useful or not useful our efforts are for others. It is particularly helpful when it's based on our learning questions.

Learning questions are what we are most curious about, what we want to explore, discover or master. They make us more attuned to new learning from any experiences going forward.

The experimenting mindset

We grow the growth-vital  experimenting mindset in two ways.

When something goes well - a new initiative, project, week or month - we can reflect on what contributed and see these as experiments we attempted. This makes them the source of learning, not just lag metrics.

When talking about what matters to us going forward, we can consider what we can and want to experiment with.

These both inspire and energize and grow growth mindsets.