Experience is not the best teacher; it is not even a good teacher. It is too slow, too imprecise, and too ambiguous. Experimentation is faster, more precise, and less ambiguous. We have to design systems which are managed experimentally, as opposed to experientially.

Misapplying experience is perhaps the surest route to failure.

I’d rather have a lot of talent and a little experience than a lot of experience and a little talent.

Life is short, Art long, Occasion sudden and dangerous, Experience deceitful, and Judgment difficult.
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Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience misleading and judgment difficult.

Time is the key differentiator between services and experiences, whether one charges for it (yet) or not. If your company wants to spend less time with your customers – and they want to spend less time with you – than you’re already on the path to commoditization. But if you want to spend more time with your customers, and they want to spend more time with you, then you have tremendous opportunities to get into the business of staging experiences.

While commodities are fungible, goods are tangible, services are intangible, experiences are memorable and transformations are effectual. All other economic offerings have no lasting consequence beyond their consumption.

If we are to learn from the experience of others, surely we have to understand their thoughts and actions in the particular situations in which they found themselves. When it comes to human action of any kind, context matters.

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.

Experience is not so much what happens to you as what you make of what happens to you.

People don't have time to seek authentic experiences, so they are looking for experiences in the products they buy.

The only thing that the passage of time achieves is to move you closer to retirement or termination. Too often, we treat experience as a noun rather than as a verb, something to accumulate ("I had an experience") rather than something to discover ("I experienced . . ."). A nasty barrier to the buildup of experience is buried in this innocent-sounding sentence: "I have learned a lot from this experience." To see the deception that's involved, contrast the statement "I have learned a lot from being in the water" with the statement "I have learned to swim." People don't learn to swim "from" the experience of being in the water. They learn to swim "through" the experience of getting better at going through the motions of swimming. The meaning of the experience becomes clear in the course of the process itself.

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Our choices are always broader than our past. The best adventures in life need to be chosen, not from a predetermined menu based on what we've done already, but rather out of our deepest sense of who we are and how we can contribute to the world.

Experience enables people to understand and internalize ideas.

A good architect has to finish three or four successful systems before he can begin to identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable.

Corollary: You can't generalize from a sample of one.

Experienced decision makers see a different world than novices do, and what they see tells them what they should do. Ultimately, intuition is all about perception. The formal rules of decision making are almost incidental.