The value of experience is as much what it takes out of your head as what it puts in. That's why it's hard to use books or lectures as a substitute for it. I wish someone had told me this when I was 20 and indignant that every job required "experience."
Lewis Mumford offered this opinion: "Raw experience is empty, just as empty as the forecastle of a whaler, as in the chamber of a counting-house; it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes that keeps existence from being vain and trivial."
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"It is the artist, however, the knower, the sayer, who realizes human experience, who takes the raw lump of ore we find in nature, smelts it, refines it, assays it, and stamps it into coins that can pass from hand to hand and make every man who touches them the richer."
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As Henri Poincare so perceptively noted, "Les faits ne parlent pas." One must construe experience. And because this task is so fraught with risk, one wants at one's fingertips a large body of successful and unsuccessful examples -- case studies of shrewdness and folly.
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