What If Your Experiences Were Preparing You for Your Life’s Work?
What If Your Experiences Were Preparing You for Your Life’s Work?
I’ve had more than a few moments in my life when I’ve wondered how on earth I ended up where I did.
My career hasn’t followed a beautifully neat trajectory. There have been successes and failures, completely new directions, periods of enormous responsibility, burnout, illness, recovery and reinvention. There have been things I actively chose and others I most definitely wouldn’t have ordered from the menu. 😂
At the time, some of those experiences felt like interruptions. Others felt as though they had taken me completely off course. It is usually only much later that I can look back and see how one experience informed another, or how something I learnt during a difficult period eventually found its way into my work.
I’ve come to think about experience rather differently because of that.
Perhaps our lives aren't divided quite as neatly as we imagine into the things that are relevant to our work and the things that aren't. Perhaps some of the experiences we are most eager to put behind us eventually become part of what we have to contribute.
Experience changes what we know
There is a difference between knowing something intellectually and knowing it because you have lived it.
We can read about leadership, business, money, change, success, failure, relationships or burnout. We can study theories and learn from other people's experiences. All of that can give us knowledge.
Then something happens to us.
Suddenly we understand the subject from the inside.
Experience adds texture. It shows us the bits that don't fit neatly into the theory. It exposes contradictions and nuances. It changes the questions we ask and, sometimes, changes the answers we are prepared to accept.
Once an experience has genuinely changed the way I understand something, I find I can't simply go back to thinking about it as I did before.
I can't unknow what it taught me.
Not every experience makes sense while we're living it
I think we're sometimes rather too quick to demand meaning from our experiences.
Something difficult happens and almost immediately we're encouraged to find the lesson, discover the gift or work out what it was trying to teach us. I've never found life quite that tidy.
Sometimes an experience is simply difficult while we're in it.
We don't yet have enough distance to understand it. We're dealing with what is immediately in front of us, and that is quite enough.
I've certainly had periods in my own life when I couldn't have told you what I was learning because I was too busy living through them. Understanding came later.
Time changes our perspective. The emotion settles. Other experiences occur. We start noticing connections that weren't visible before. Something that once looked like an ending begins to look like a turning point, or something we thought had taken us off track becomes relevant in a way we could never have predicted.
That doesn't mean the difficult thing needed to happen or that we should be grateful for every experience we've had.
It simply means we can decide what we do with what we now know.
Experience becomes source material
This is something I recognise very clearly in the way I create.
I experience something. I become curious about it. I think about it, question it and often talk about it. Eventually I begin to see the idea underneath the experience.
And then, when there is something useful to say, it finds a form.
It might become a conversation. A piece of writing. A question I ask somebody. A framework. A resource. A product. Sometimes it changes the direction of something I'm already creating.
The experience itself isn't necessarily the work.
What I understand because of it can become the work.
That distinction matters to me because simply telling our personal stories isn't automatically useful to anybody else. Our experience belongs to us. The value for somebody else often appears when we can look beyond the events themselves and recognise the question, pattern or insight that another person might use in her own way.
Our businesses contain more of our lives than we realise
When I look at The Minerva Manifesto now, I can see how much lived experience sits underneath it.
The original research came from conversations with women, but I wasn't standing outside those conversations as a detached observer. I brought my own experience of work, transformation, responsibility, success and burnout into the questions I was asking.
Over the years, more experience has been added.
My understanding of what it means to Do Business. Make Money. Enjoy Life. isn't something I arrived at once and then stopped thinking about. Life keeps giving me new information.
My relationship with business has changed. My relationship with money has changed. My definition of success has changed. What I need from my working life has changed.
And as those things have changed, the way I understand Minerva has deepened too.
Perhaps that is inevitable. We don't create businesses in isolation from the rest of our lives. We bring our history, experiences, assumptions and accumulated wisdom with us.
A wrong turn may look different in hindsight
I think this matters particularly in business because we are very quick to categorise experiences as successes or failures.
The offer sold or it didn't. The business worked or it didn't. We made the money or we didn't. We took the opportunity and it led somewhere — or apparently nowhere.
But commercial outcomes aren't the only information an experience gives us.
A business that didn't work might teach us something important about what customers actually value. A client relationship that went badly might change the boundaries we create in future. A period of exhaustion might force us to question a business model we had assumed we should be able to sustain.
Even success can teach us something unexpected. We can achieve precisely what we were aiming for and discover that we don't actually want the life attached to it.
None of this means we need to romanticise failure or go looking for difficult experiences because they might make us wiser.
I'd quite happily acquire some of my wisdom the easy way. 😂
It simply means that an experience doesn't have to produce the outcome we originally wanted in order to have value.
What do you know now that you didn't know before?
Perhaps that's one of the questions worth asking when we look back over our working lives.
Not simply, What have I done?
But, What do I know because I've done it?
What have you learnt about people? About business? About money? About yourself? What have you discovered through the things that worked beautifully — and through the things that spectacularly didn't?
There may be knowledge there that you've dismissed because it didn't arrive through a qualification, job title or conventional route.
But experience has its own kind of authority.
And sometimes the thing we've lived through becomes the reason we can see something somebody else cannot yet see.
Perhaps it was part of the work
I don't believe every event in our lives happens in order to teach us something. Some things happen because life is life.
But I do believe we can choose what we create from what we've experienced.
That is an important distinction.
Our experiences don't have to define us, and we don't have to spend the rest of our lives talking about them. But neither do we necessarily need to discard them in our rush to move forward.
They may contain something useful.
A question. An insight. A different way of seeing something. An idea that becomes a business. A resource that makes somebody else's path a little easier.
Perhaps even the beginnings of our life's work.
So instead of looking only at where you think you're going, it might be worth occasionally looking backwards too.
What if some of the experiences you thought had taken you off track were actually showing you something about what you have to contribute?
Explore The Journey
The Journey is an invitation to explore your experiences, become curious about what they have shown you and consider what you want to carry forward into the business, money and life you are creating.
