Experience

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."

-Fred Brooks

Since we are all mere human beings, it is inevitable for us to make mistakes. What we take away from our errors, however, is that which matters and shapes each of us. The mistakes we make can serve as ways to improve, and to learn the definite difference between what is characteristically ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Given any typical fault, such as a child stealing something, expectantly teaches the child that theft is essentially wrong. Simplistic life lessons like these serve as the ideal suggestion of Brooks’ quote; one commits an error, learns from it, and then hopefully doesn’t make that same mistake for a second time. We all, in essence, know what is acceptable and improper in society. Of course, everyone has their own slip-ups every now and then, and once aware of our faults, we can benefit from it by choosing not to make the same errors.

However, the question that should be asked is, even when we’re conscious of doing something that’s ‘wrong’, do we still choose not to do it? The answer is flatly no. It’s not unusual to hear that someone chose to do something that they knew wasn’t the best choice. This is factual for every one of any age, infants, teenagers, and even the most morally sound adults have all, at least once in their life, chosen to go through with a scenario that they knew was wide of the mark. The choice to defy the generally accepted behavior and choices of any culture is typically seen in young adults, in dealing with drugs, school, and family, which often times can be blamed for the general stretch of time where young adults are finding themselves. This search, for who they are, individuality, and what they can and will become is prone to initiate a number of bad calls on judgment, thereby constructing the ‘experience’ of choosing to make a consequential decision. The sheer experience of anything is something we all search for in life, the desire for the archetypal occurrences we see in the media, movies, our society, all fabricate that burning, unavoidable curiosity that can lead us to those ‘experiences’ we call life lessons and memories.

This transitive idea that suitable judges of character come from familiarity and that familiarity comes from making an improper choice, thus saying that good judgment comes from bad judgment is, for the most part, accurate. We don’t need to make bad decisions before we know what good decisions are. And just because one may have ‘good’ judgment, it most certainly doesn’t denote that they will use it to make good choices; it simply means that they are conscious of what is ethically sound.

And that is exactly what separates people into those who don’t know what’s right and do something wrong, and those who do know what’s right and still choose to do what’s wrong. The ability to use experiences as a means of generating improved judgment varies for each individual, though it outlines and defines each one of us into the inescapably flawed entities we are.