The fact is you learn by doing. There are too many “gurus” out there now. Advice is useful, but you don’t learn to drive until you get behind the wheel.
What if you just trusted yourself enough to try?
I’m not saying ignore wisdom. Wisdom didn’t just appear overnight. And the wise might just have the final piece of guidance for you to head in the right direction.
I love how much information is readily available everywhere for us now to know better. But some of us spend so much time researching the perfect way to begin that we never actually begin. We watch tutorials on repeat, read aimlessly, ask a bunch of people for their opinion, and somehow mistake collecting information for making progress.
Knowledge is important, but experience is unforgettable.
If someone has walked the road before you, there’s definitely value in listening. They might help you avoid a few potholes. But no one can walk your road for you. That’s all I’m saying.
At some point, you have to trade certainty for curiosity.
You’ll make mistakes. That’s good. You’ll discover shortcuts no one mentioned because they were unique to your journey. You’ll also find that some of the things people warned you about never happen, while the challenges you do face are ones nobody could have predicted.
There’s something freeing about trusting yourself enough to find out. I’ve learned more from the things I tried than from the things I planned. Sometimes the outcome was success; sometimes it was failure. Sometimes just a story. Every now and then it was an expensive lesson. But even those lessons had a way of paying me back later. An aha moment.
Life isn’t a multiple-choice test where there’s one correct answer hidden somewhere in the back of the book. It’s more like learning to dance. You can watch everyone else move, study the steps, and memorize the rhythm, but until you step onto the floor, you’re still just an observer.
So ask for advice when you need it. Learn from people who have earned your respect. But don’t let someone else’s certainty become an excuse for your hesitation. Get your feet wet!
First attempts can be awkward, but by the second time you get be better. And one day, someone will ask you how you did it.
The funny part here is I’m another stranger on the internet trying to give you some advice. I know, I know. But take it only if it’s practical to you. The thing is one day I just started going for it — doing my thing — and now I feel qualified to tell you to do the same. Just harmless, sensible lessons about life, which I learned by doing, not through shortcuts.
Action is usually where the real education begins.
I wrote Not Another Inspirational Quote: 100 Something Life Lessons based on this, my philosophy on life lessons and experience. You can check out that book of quotes here: Amazon, and other digital platforms.
And here’s an excerpt.