I think it would be noncontroversial to say that lessons learned are reflections of experiences and an attempt to distill things down to their simplest and most memorable form.
The beauty (and aim) of this distillation is so that you can recall them quickly to apply to future situations.
Some lessons are fairly obvious regardless of whether or not you’ve faced the situation before:
Don’t use your bare hands to take out the turkey dish from the oven.
Some are a little less obvious:
Don’t immediately run cold water on a glass dish that’s been in the oven because no one likes fishing out cracked pieces of glass from the sink drain.
And some are really hard to abide by:
Don’t cook the turkey too long to prevent it from drying out.
For the record:
- I have not cracked a glass dish thanks to two years of warnings in Honors and AP Chemistry in high school
- My turkey cooking skills are on point, protip: wrap the outsides of the turkey in a meshed grid of bacon and you will basically win
Moving beyond the do’s and don’t’s of “lessons learned” there are more complex lessons passed on and told. These lessons often are seemingly obvious and don’t even require time mentioning (“Ya, duh I know that mom”):
Communication is the key to success.
But then taken in a different context, the absolute nature of the core lesson gets rationalized away by relativity and context dependent lines of reasoning.
If you love her, tell her only when….
Don’t bring up the fact he isn’t pulling his weight with the group yet, we’ll get to that but first…
And then there are also those lessons learned that present a mental model for options and weighing decisions like an equation or scale
Without knowledge, action is useless and knowledge without action is futile
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
The point is that lessons learned can be summed up into nice lists. You can read those lists with a subtle satisfaction that a lot of the points “seem so obvious” you get it and quickly move on. Then there are some where you might justify not abiding by, “well he’s a baby boomer, we millennials are different”, “things are different in this field”, etc. And some, you may feel like you understand but are a little unsure of but it seems fairly obvious and intuitive so you’ll accept it and move right along.
The problem is that many of the most effective lessons learned stem from direct experiences (typically failures) that provide far more meaning and context than does reading a few bullet-pointed sentences. (Perhaps that’s the difference between knowledge and wisdom, academia and real-world experience)
At the same time, it would be silly not to attempt to learn from those who have done (or tried to do), have the wisdom and are willing to share it.
Regardless of whether or not you had an experience, the sad truth is that many of these lessons learned aren’t applied, aren’t consciously utilized. For example:
Eat healthy and workout to be a fitter, happier you
The point of this post is to introduce mental models and lessons learned, not to dive into why we don’t apply them in particular situations. It also serves to help document for me my own mental models–a place to collect and write them down. I need reminders too, and I hope this post acts as one of those much needed reminders.
And with that said, below are my top lessons learned, most of which are from my experience with my Mastermind-Ironman Group. I hope that many of them you will inherently understand and internalize, that some you might not have considered but are now, and the rest…well just let me know if some of them you need more explanation.
I did this exercise with the other members of my old Mastermind-Ironman Group Dano and Eric, and I hope to share their responses as well at some point because they are beautiful. Part of the beauty is that I can recall very specific experiences they went through that laid the foundation for their models.
- Start with why
- You attract who you are and what you are ready for
- Your body is both a mechanical machine and a chemical machine, don’t forget how those are inextricably linked
- You should never stop being curious about who you are and the world around you
- It’s not about having the perfect answer for a question; it’s about having the perfect question for an answer
- You give actions meaning based on your mental models to help you process life. Be cautious in faulting the action (or person) without assessing your model and yourself as well.
- Language is your most basic mental model. Languages affect the way people and cultures think and act.
- Move from a victim mindset to an empowerment one despite the fact that you have less control on your and others’ outcomes than you might think, but act as though you might anyways
- Break large goals into small steps, and sometimes the small steps you’ve already taken need to be viewed retrospectively through the lens of large leaps to continue motivating you on your path
- Practice finding joy in life and you will find more joy. Believe life has more joy and others will perceive you as bringing joy to life and to them. This is true for all emotions and energies both positive and negative.
- It’s not how you think you are; it’s about how you make others feel when they are with you that will determine your reputation
- Collaboration is great, until it becomes competition, and most things will have that evolution at some point, prepare and embrace that inevitability, and make a plan to evolve it back
- Think in integrated systems not linear causes and effects
- Learn to be comfortable with receiving the will of the world as much as you are with acting out your will on the world
- Reading without action is self-gratifying; action without reading is self-centered
- Take action to motivate your readings. Take your readings to improve your actions.
- Sometimes going at it alone and facing uncertainty is better than going with someone who you already know it won’t work with
- Communicate the hard stuff, everyone else will communicate the easy stuff
- Call out the elephant in the room, everyone feels it, and no one will fully move past it until it is
- You are your own limiting factor AND biggest deceiver. Embrace others you trust to provide lighthouses on your journey to ensure both of these points are kept at bay
- Society has been built around certainty and predictability of the future, and yet the only thing truly certain and predictable is death. Don’t let your pursuit for control and certainty prevent you from living
- Embrace your triune brain, don’t repress your lower brains, find a way to let it work for you and your higher goals and desires
- For a man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail
- Learn to embrace stillness within yourself and you can overcome any chaos in the world
- WIIFM (what’s in it for me) runs the world
- Have an abundant mindset versus a scarcity mindset
- Hard work passionately pursued is still hard work
- Be better today
- Spiral Up
A final note about models is that you can change them. Mine have definitely evolved over time, and I actually look forward to evolving them as opposed to stubbornly defending them should a nuance or better model be presented based on new experiences.
What are some of your mental models?