Nothing Beats Direct Experience

Self help books won't substitute the knowledge you really need

Trying to prepare for worst-case scenarios in your creative journey is all good, but I firmly believe nothing will ever beat direct experience. Going through the fist-pumping successes of landing your first high-paying clients or the depths of suffering when the project you’ve spent weeks and weeks on doesn’t even get close to the expectations you held for it.

No matter how many self-help books, videos or blog posts (yes, even this one) we dive into, nothing quite beats the lessons we learn from actually living through these situations ourselves.

Consuming vs direct experience

Don't get me wrong, consuming self-help content is great. It can prepare us for situations we might be unfamiliar with. But here's the thing: when you read books, blogs and more, you’re only intellectualizing the content based on the experiences you’ve already had. It’s incredibly hard to do this by intellectualizing a future situation you haven’t yet experienced the joys or pain of.

It’s not until you face the consequences of forgetting to apply the knowledge you once read in these books that they truly begin to stick.

In my Creative journey, I've had my fair share of mess-ups. The memory of those mistakes and the pain of not doing something the way I should have, made repeating the same f**k ups much harder.

The second best source for life lessons

While books, videos and blogs are helpful, having a close friend share their experiences is a step up from these. When someone candidly says, "I messed up," someone that you know and is vulnerable enough to share the ins and outs of how they screwed things up, it just hits differently.

I have a friend who is great with women and has a fascinating dating life. However, their desire for more novelty led them to lose a partner who, from my perspective, was a stable source of comfort and companionship. Observing the consequences of their choice taught me that pursuing more and more in relation to dating wasn’t worth the negatives it would bring for the kind of life I wanna live.

I knew I’d get more from accepting what I had and investing in my current relationship rather than being trapped in a constant chase for more, better, hotter! This friend's direct experience helped me avoid having a direct experience of something that would feel like a failure for myself.

Everyone will encounter pain, loss, and various difficulties in life. Books and online resources can serve as coping mechanisms, avoidance strategies or shortcuts, but they can't replace the growth from personal experience. Personal experience is your #1 best source for life lessons.

Applying Knowledge

Take the topic of negotiations with potential clients in our creative careers. You can read all the tactics and methods for discussing rates with potential clients, but books won't give you the confidence to go into those situations with a sense of ‘I know what I’m doing here’. You might have a framework to follow, but a humming sense of anxiety might overshadow your trust in those strategies. You might worry they won't apply to your particular situation or client; even if you try to replicate what you've read word for word, you’ll still doubt whether you expressed yourself as the author intended.

You have to actively engage with a piece of knowledge in the real world to integrate it into your life.

Embracing Failure

People would prefer to follow an exact path to avoid inevitable failures.

They'd rather pay for an ebook or coaching to avoid potential pitfalls. Everyone wants to avoid mistakes and find the most efficient path to success. While this mindset is understandable, and I often consume knowledge from others, so I feel I have the best chance to reach my goals in the quickest way possible, it can frequently prevent us from taking the actions necessary to gain direct experience of failure or success.

We can get stuck in analysis paralysis, soaking in as much knowledge as possible before taking any direct action ourselves.

Direct experience may take longer to yield the rewards because of the failures you’ll hit before you start experiencing successes, but the knowledge gained will be deeply ingrained in your mind. You’ll learn valuable lessons from failures that you probably would have entirely skipped.

And, by not skipping these early on, you’ll be rewarded with an ability to navigate similar circumstances when the stakes of your failure will often be much higher and damaging to your career.

If you’re an inspiring, creative freelancer and want a heads-up on the struggles you’ll have to navigate, you should check out this video on my YouTube channel. In it, I share five make-or-break difficulties that, if you can get through, will help your creative life to be sustainable in the long run.

Thanks for reading to the end 😊

Keep creating

- Adam