Experience is a great teacher.
There are so many things you can’t appreciate or understand in life until you experience them.
No matter how descriptive you are, you probably won’t be able to get a blind man (from birth) to appreciate colors because such a situation will require a picture that even a million words cannot replace.
It will take an experience of what colors are to teach him about colors.
This may not mean so much to a deaf man:
“The concert was great, the music was sublime. The melodies were from heaven and the harmony was creative, lots of beautiful horn section arrangements, and an amazing guitar solo.”
…especially if he was born deaf, and hasn’t heard any sound all his life.
Here are a couple more situations in life where experience counts…
Employment: There are many companies out there that only hire staff for positions based on their wealth of experience, which is usually measured in years.
Child birth: No matter what a woman reads about child birth, ranging from the feeling from day one through nine months, to its pains and pangs, the experience of it will beat everything she’s read. And trust me, she may even have better information on child birth than what she read.
I had to say all this so that you wouldn’t be offended when I say that experience is NOT the best teacher.
Experience Is Not The Best Teacher
I’m a firm believer that experience is a teacher. However, I really think there’s something wrong with the adage that says “experience is the best teacher.”
There are things in life that you don’t need to learn via experience. Here are a few of them:
#1 – Testing Positive for HIV/AIDS
According to the Aids Foundation of Chicago:
“HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus.
It is the virus that can lead to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. Unlike some other viruses, the human body cannot get rid of HIV. That means that once you have HIV, you have it for life.
No safe and effective cure currently exists, but scientists are working hard to find one, and remain hopeful.”
How many of us would love to experience HIV/AIDS to learn how it feels? The answer is none.
#2 – Making Hell In Eternity
Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.
Revelation 20:15 (NIV)
According to the Holy Bible, “…the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone…”
Fire and brimstone can be likened to the molten material beneath the earth (aka – “magma”) that erupts from volcanoes. According to scientists, the molten magma is 7 to 13 times hotter than the temperature that can boil water.
Think about that. Now, would you love to experience hell before you learn that it isn’t a place for you?
Heck, even God sent his word to educate us on hell and this is because he knows that the experience of hell is not the best way to learn about it.
There are many other things that we don’t need to learn from experience and time will fail me to list them all.
“What Is The Best Teacher If Experience Isn’t?”
“Learn from history or you’re doomed to repeat it.”
― Jesse Ventura
If you do not learn from other people’s history, then experience will have to teach you.
History is basically knowledge and information of the past that can help guide and shape the future. So many people who have refused learning from information have learned from experience.
A book on teen pregnancy written by someone who had a terrible history with teen pregnancy can help several teen girls overcome it.
However, those who do not have access to this information at the end of the day will have to learn through experience and that’s not the best. Instead of learning from experience, you can learn from information.
In Music, Information Beats Experience.
Jermaine Griggs (my role model) will always tell us about his experience through the school of hard-knocks, going through all the challenges of learning the hardest way possible to get to where he is.
Can you imagine what would have happened to you and I and hundreds of thousands of people around the world if he didn’t start HearandPlay.com in August 2000? People like you and I would still be enrolling in the same school of hard knocks to experience the same thing.
Over the years, people have grown to associate experience with information. But here’s a distinction between the two:
One can be experienced, yet uninformed. There are organists out there with 40 years of experience who can’t attempt half of what students who have used our organ course can play. It’s possible to be stuck in a level for 40 years, repeating the same thing. Unless such people experience the transformation that comes from information, they’ll really have nothing to show for it.
One can be inexperienced, yet informed. When I learned from our gospelkeys ministry musician course in 2011, it informed me with a whole lot of stuff about gospel piano playing. Indeed, I may not have 30 years of experience in piano playing, but with the information I got then, I sure sounded like one who does.
Can I ask you a few questions…
Would you want information on playing worship like you’ve played for over 10 years or would you love to experience 10 years of hard knocks and beating around the bush?
Would you want a 10 years of experience on jazz piano invested in practicing, transcribing, traveling for concerts and a lot more to be passed to you in 5 hours of information with little to no pain, trips etc., or would you prefer to do it yourself?
So you see, although experience is a great teacher, information is the best teacher.
Our president and founder insists that “…playing piano without years of lessons…is now easier than ever before!” because he understood what other people are yet to figure out – quality information in hours can be commensurate with experience in years.
The Price Of Experience
Before we end today’s post, let’s look at what it would cost you to learn from experience alone.
#1 – Experience costs you time
I have burned the midnight oil for several years trying to figure things out on my own.
There were even times when I’d learn the wrong things, internalize them, only for me to discover they were wrong and unlearn. Trust me, all these processes take a whole lot of time.
Learning from us here at Hearandplay.com affords you the opportunity to key into our experiences in a fraction of the time and avoid our mistakes.
#2 – Experience usually comes with pain
It’s called the school of hard knocks, where every gain comes with pain.
If most experienced players you respect open up to tell you what they’ve been through to get to where they are today, you wouldn’t want to be like them anymore.
Dropping out of the university in 2011 (in my third year of school) wasn’t the easiest decision to make. Everyone literally misunderstood me and eventually wrote me off.
It was this painful moment in my life that led me to now studying music in the university – 2012 to 2016. Story of my life.
Do you have to drop out of school to partake in what I know? No!
All you need to do is to learn from the information I give daily on this blog and apply it in a fraction of the time it took me to learn it and more so without feeling the pain.
Final Words
I firmly believe that you’ll take my advice.
Visit our catalog page now and access information that will catapult you to playing like a musician with several decades of experience.
We’ve featured Kevin Nickelson, Jonathan Powell, James Wrubel, Mike Bereal, Jason White, Jeffrey Goodkind, and several other world-class instructors in our courses, each instructor having 10 – 25 years experience on their instrument.
Wouldn’t you love to learn from their experience or would you prefer to re-invent the wheel?
The choice is yours.
Chuku Onyemachi
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