“During my last few years of school, I came to realize that my path to knowledge would not lead me to libraries, professors, universities, and studies. My path to knowledge was through living life and experiencing reality. I could learn plenty secondhand, but nothing was ever to surpass the experiences I had in the wilderness. All my knowledge of social, scientific, and religious issues has been acquired through personal experience.”
– Reinhold Messner, My Life at the Limits
______________________________________________
“Our friend Albert Bandura has a catchy name for the way these learning experiences compound– enactive mastery experiences… According to Bandura, an enactive mastery experience refers to the process of learning through doing. Learning through doing is one of the most powerful forces in human psychology. It’s the second key strategy if we’re to build our sense of power. Why? Because the more we do something, the greater our sense of control. We learn. We level up our skills. Our confidence grows. And we empower ourselves.”
– Ali Abdaal, Feel-Good Productivity
______________________________________________
If something is borrowed, you can’t put as much trust in it as something that you own.
You might borrow an identity.
For example, the identity of climber can be borrowed.
I might climb a mountain once a year, and so I borrow the title of a climber.
I can never be that confident in my skills because I haven’t tested them. They are just borrowed for the day, for the weekend, the length of the trip.
If we own something, we have true knowledge.
We know the nuances.
If I borrow a car, I don’t quite know how it will handle on corners, how good the brakes are, what speed makes the engine purr.
I’m tentative because the car is borrowed.
I can’t quite trust it to perform.
And it’s the same with any activity that we haven’t mastered.
We borrow the skills until we get familiar with it.
We only get familiar and confident with something we use all the time.
Never from something that we just pick up and borrow then put back down.
We accumulate confidence.
We are made owners through doing.
Conversations With Quotations 