A feeling that can only be realized after personal experience.

A feeling that can only be realized after personal experience.

Many things need our personal experience to understand. Let me talk about those feelings that can only be understood after personal experience!

First, why do we often say that we often have to experience it ourselves to understand it?

1. Personal experience.

The emotional memory brought by experiencing a negative event in person is much stronger than watching or hearing others experience the same event, and the negative conditioned reflex is much more lasting. We can really feel empathy to a certain extent, but psychological experiments also show that, in terms of intensity, we can't really feel the pain of others. Made a mistake (but not me) p 192 gave an extremely ingenious experiment:

Even if the two are actually the same degree, the pain we feel ourselves is always much stronger than the pain of watching others.

An old joke goes like this: If someone breaks a leg, it's no big deal. If we break a nail, we will shout. This joke just vividly describes the way our brain nervous system works. British neuroscientists have done an experiment: people are paired with an eye for an eye. Each pair of subjects has a clip on their index finger. The experimenter put some pressure on one of them through this clip, and then asked him to put the same pressure on his partner. As a result, no one can be fair. Although they try hard to be fair, they always exert more power on their peers-they think this is the power they bear. Researchers believe that this effect is a natural by-product of our neural processing mechanism. This experiment helps to explain a phenomenon that we often notice: two people punch me and I punch you. In this way, the strength of the fist will soon become heavier and heavier, from slapstick to real fight. Both sides thought they were dealing with each other fairly, but in fact, they were not fighting tooth for tooth, but fighting tooth for tooth. As a result, when they bounced back, that guy tried to take your leg off.

My good friend Xu You recently experienced seven hours in kidney calculi, and wrote in his blog:

There is a saying called empathy. I didn't experience the pain of kidney calculi before, but I only supported Sanlu baby's rights protection morally; Now, I sincerely support the rights protection action of Sanlu Baby. I even want to torture those who add melamine to milk powder, those who knowingly block it for months, and those who prohibit parents from defending their rights. In my lifetime, I want to give those who do harm a cup of melamine milk powder, so that they can "empathize" with this kind of colic and know whether they are human or not.

2. Stories from other people's mouths.

The story told by others may only be one aspect of the matter, and it is inevitable that it will be biased by its own ideas. Each of us looks at the world with colored glasses, and few people can describe a thing objectively and comprehensively. Other people's stories may be just their ideas, and your own experience of the same thing may be completely another idea.

3. Why?

When others tell you a truth, they can only tell you how to do it, but it is difficult to explain why, let alone "have to do it" (because they may not be able to explain it clearly themselves). It's hard to convince yourself that option A is better than option B until you hear logical and irrefutable evidence, and you finally hit the south wall on a road.

4. The world is complicated.

What's more, many times people can't guarantee that option A is better than option B: for example, studying hard may not have a good future; If you don't study hard, you don't have to be a mess in the future. Smoking is not necessarily short-lived, and not smoking is not necessarily long-lived. Persistence in the end doesn't necessarily mean victory (even perdition), and failure to persist in the end doesn't necessarily mean failure (it's also important to learn to give up). This is a complex world, and various complex factors influence each other. It is almost always inappropriate to explain events with a single cause and effect. The only way to reliably understand the relationship between factor X and factor Y is through randomized controlled experiments.

5. The future is uncertain.

Humans are born with the need to seek certainty and control the small world around them. We always want to hear such comforting words as "You have done this, and you can do it again in the future". However, contrary to our illusion of control, there are too many uncertainties in this world. Except for our own controllable factors, the external opportunity factors can hardly be controlled or predicted. The best we can do is to be mentally prepared and try not to miss the opportunity. Because of this, you will almost never hear enough convincing evidence to tell you, "You just need? , can you? " Because success depends not only on personal factors. Personal factors are often just insufficient and unnecessary conditions for success. Man proposes, God disposes. But there is no need to be pessimistic, because there is no doubt that improving personal factors can greatly increase the chances of success.

Second, you must understand it by personal experience?

1. Stupid and childish conditioned reflex.

Conditioned reflex is a stupid and naive system-we often choose to give up our exercises after being rebuffed. However, actually hitting the south wall does not necessarily mean that it is wrong, but it may just be bad luck. Just because you didn't get a good result doesn't mean your process is wrong. Some people study hard, only to find that their middle school classmates are lucky enough to become nouveau riche or find a good husband, so they come to the pessimistic conclusion that learning is useless. It is conceivable that if he changes his practice and waits for the opportunity to come all day, he may also be defeated. Similarly, the correct result does not mean that the method must be correct. This is especially true in financial markets. Gorillas also have good luck in stock picking (black swan), especially when the general trend is favorable. But does this mean that the method used is correct? The objective method is to pay attention to the process, not the single result-because even the best process may fail occasionally, but in the long run, a good process will inevitably bring better results as a whole. (Don't be a normal fool. Chapter 12: A good cat must catch mice-result prejudice introduces this. )

2. Cognitive bias.

We have all kinds of systematic cognitive biases: we often give wrong explanations and attribution to things (even if we are witnesses), and sometimes even "the authorities are confused, and the bystanders are clear." Teacher Li Xiaolai once told an interesting story about his personal experience:

My coach's arm circumference is 43 cm, almost as thick as ordinary people's thighs. Once he told me the trick of his practice-when holding a dumbbell, he must stick the edge of his palm on the dumbbell piece close to his body. In this case, the other end of the dumbbell will naturally rotate outward by a small angle, and the muscle can get the maximum varicose vein stimulation when the arm flexes and stretches. Then he smiled proudly and said, "How simple!" But I suddenly understood another thing: his success didn't actually come from this so-called "simple and mysterious skill", because I knew another fitness instructor with an arm circumference of 45 cm, and I had never seen a coach with an arm circumference of 45 cm lift dumbbells in this way. But it all worked. (Excerpted from "Differences in Spiritual Power")

In fact, many successful people's own summaries are unreliable, because it is difficult for them to correctly attribute their success to themselves. For example, we all have a tendency to attribute failure to external factors and success to our own abilities. Psychology calls it self-service bias. In addition, there are various cognitive biases in human thinking. Whether you are a winner or a loser, as long as you don't have a basic understanding of human thinking and psychological mechanism, you can't escape the influence of cognitive bias. First of all, you can also read some classic thinking fallacies in How Do We Know What Is Not the Case, or read this popular science article published by Yuan on TopLanguage: About "Unknown Fields" and Critical Thinking.

3. Emotional system.

The reason why we strongly rely on the need to experience a negative event to learn is because our usual decision-making and judgment strongly depend on the output of the emotional system. If something feels right, it's hard to convince ourselves not to do it, and if it feels wrong, it's hard to convince ourselves not to do it. This strong dependence on the emotional system makes the rational evidence look weak in the face of strong emotions. In fact, our intuition is really smart in many cases (blinking and intuition), but it also fails in many cases (there are examples in the previous article). The correct way is not to listen to intuitive opinions in general, nor to listen to them in general, but to regard it as a heuristic judgment, and then use your rational brain to test it objectively and logically. We can control the emotional system to some extent. After all, the emotional system is just one of the decision-making systems in our evolutionary toolbox, not the whole thing. In addition, don't forget that the emotional system is just a rough judgment and decision-making system, which is often used to adapt to ancient society rather than modern society (despicable gene).

Third, you can understand without experience-the power of reason.

We tend not to think deeply about things. After shallow thinking, if our emotional system or intuition has given us a tendency, few people will continue to think deeply and start to act. This sloppy attitude is often the root of failure. After hitting a wall, we passively "let the facts tell us" that a scheme is not feasible, and let the facts take our place to think and reason. We get information from failure and know why the previous method is not suitable. This is why we sometimes feel the need to experience it ourselves. However, this does not mean that we can only "find out after doing it" at any time. The most powerful ability of human beings is social learning-ordinary people learn from their own mistakes, and smart people learn from others' mistakes.

Another powerful human ability is induction and reasoning-a few lines of reasoning can change the way we look at the world. (via)

We can think seriously and rationally, weigh the pros and cons of each choice, and not just be satisfied with emotional judgment. Assuming that we are faced with two choices, A and B, we can combine other people's experience and use our own reasoning ability to infer the possible advantages and disadvantages of option A or B respectively. For uncertain factors, we can either collect more information from others to make the judgment more reliable, or we can estimate the upper and lower limits of the risk. In short, we try our best to make the imagined characters experience in our brains fail-to find out that a certain road is not feasible through reasoning, thus avoiding reality.

The farther we go in the brain, the more stable we will be in reality. The more times you fail in your brain, the less times you fail in reality.

Until it is really impossible to know the answer in advance (the problem you are facing has never been explored before), you must explore it yourself. At that time, we were no longer repeating the old path taken by others, but explorers and innovators, because we stood on the shoulders of others.

Fourth, the end.

In fact, one of the most important abilities of people in modern society is whether they can learn from other people's mistakes. It is often such a person who can quickly walk in front of others and jump from where others fall. If we do everything, then history will never progress. We will only let everyone repeat the mistakes made by others from birth and the quagmire repeated by others. There is really nothing new under the sun, and history will really repeat itself forever. However, history tells us that this is not the case. Although many people will or even need to make some mistakes, there are also many people who can learn from others' mistakes.

This is an information society. Everyone's experience and lessons, everyone's knowledge are spread by the Internet at an unprecedented speed. No matter what topic we pay attention to, we can always find a bunch of books, forums and web pages quickly. However, whether you can gain knowledge from them and avoid doing push-ups that others have done depends on whether you have a pair of discerning eyes and a thinking heart, otherwise you can only play soy sauce in the face of massive information.

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