Experience is What You Do!!!!!!!

"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you." - Aldous Huxley

What an amazing man Aldous Huxley was. I admit I have never read Brave New World but I have read a lot of his brief essays and items like that. He had an amazing upbringing in an extraordinary family.

We live in a world where most people complain about their circumstances. It seems 95% of people will say the reason something did or did not happen was the circumstances they were under and not their reactions to it. More people blame what happened to them rather than what they did in those circumstances.

I used to be in the group that blamed everything. I still do not know how I got there as I didn’t start out that way. My dad and my Uncle Ralph were the two most important male role models of my youth. Both of those guys would experience whatever happened to them and then deal with it. No complaints, nothing. In fact both would look at something like a rain storm when there was a lot of work to do outside and say something like, “Well now we can clean the garage, do this or do that….” My dad was a public accountant and did personal tazes for a LOT of people. I never heard him complain. He never talked about anything other than the things he was doing and where those actions were leading him.

Then I got into the “real world” where circumstances drove the results. I remember working in sales during a recession. Our sales group hit our sales targets. No other group did. The VP of sales asked how we did that. Honestly, at the time I did not know. But later I realized what happened. We realized that we could make our own circumstances. But slowly we fell into the deep pit of blaming everything else rather than ourselves for good things or bad…..

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.” – George Bernard Shaw

I have been teaching for 26 years now. I look back on my students and see this 95:5 ratio in action. I teach about 20 students in each class. Now because I am teaching an apprentice class and therefore the ratio will be a little better in my classes because these are movers and shakers that start my classes. BUT STILL only 1 or 2 people in the class really want to improve their circumstances.

So I look way back to my dad and Uncle Ralph and am starting to re-program myself into making my own circumstances. I don’t care what happens to me, I will take the circumstance and bend it with my will to achieve my will.

I now follow Shaw’s words – if I don’t see the circumstances I see, I will make them.