A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’
Douglas Adams
The meaning of the quote
A man burns his dinner on Monday. He burns it again on Tuesday, and by Wednesday he’s telling friends that cooking has been a learning experience.
Douglas Adams had no patience for that kind of talk. In the book The Salmon of Doubt, a collection of his essays, interviews and unfinished writing published in 2002, he describes a learning experience as a message that tells you to stop repeating what you just did. By that definition our cook has learned nothing yet, because Tuesday looked exactly like Monday.
The joke works because it’s so small. Adams doesn’t talk about wisdom or growth or resilience. He shrinks the whole idea down to a note you could leave for yourself, naming the mistake and telling yourself to drop it.
Most of us skip that step because feeling bad passes for learning. We replay the embarrassing meeting for a week, wince every time we think of it and call that reflection. But guilt without a rule is just a bad evening. A real lesson changes what you do the next time the same situation shows up.
On October 30, 1935, the Boeing Model 299 (the plane that became the B-17 bomber) crashed on a test flight at Wright Field in Ohio. The cause was a control lock that nobody released before takeoff. The pilots didn’t decide the plane was too complicated to fly. They wrote a short checklist, and checklists have been standard in cockpits ever since.
That is what Adams is asking for. The mistake gets turned into an instruction, and the instruction gets used.
It also takes some pressure off. Mistakes help the brain build new patterns, covered in Learning through mistakes: From Einstein to Edison, so making them is fine. Making the same one 5 times in a row is the part worth fixing.
Action steps
The next time something goes wrong, you can turn it into a learning experience in about 2 minutes. These steps keep it from staying a story you tell at dinner.
- Write the lesson as an order to yourself. “I should be more careful” doesn’t count, but “Check the attachment before hitting send” does. You can follow a rule tomorrow, whereas a vague feeling will be gone by Friday.
- Write it down while it’s fresh. Within an hour of the mistake you still remember what actually caused it. A week later you’ll remember the embarrassment and not much else.
- Check your last 3 mistakes. If the same one shows up twice, the lesson was never written or never used. Put the rule where you’ll see it, like a sticky note on your laptop or the first line of your to-do list.
A mistake becomes a learning experience when something changes afterward.
About the author
In 1971, a young Douglas Adams lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, staring at the stars with a copy of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe in his rucksack. The idea that struck him was that somebody ought to write a hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy.
It took him 7 years to get anywhere with it. After he graduated from Cambridge in 1974, the BBC turned down much of what he pitched, and his style didn’t fit what producers wanted. He paid the bills with odd jobs, including night shifts as a bodyguard for a wealthy Arab family and cleaning chicken sheds.
Then his radio series launched on BBC Radio 4 on March 8, 1978, and spread by word of mouth until it was a hit. The story became a novel, then a series of them. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made him one of the best-known comic writers in the English language.
He worked on Doctor Who too, serving as script editor for its 17th season. His proudest work was a nonfiction book, Last Chance to See, about his trips with zoologist Mark Carwardine to find endangered animals.
Adams was famous for missing deadlines, and he turned that into a joke of his own. He is credited with saying that he loved deadlines, especially the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
He also claimed to be the first person in the UK to buy an Apple Macintosh, though his friend Stephen Fry disputed it. He came up with the title of Pink Floyd’s 1994 album The Division Bell too.
Adams died of a heart attack in Santa Barbara, California, on May 11, 2001, at the age of 49. The Salmon of Doubt came out the following year, and fans still celebrate Towel Day on May 25 in his memory.
Resources
- The Salmon of Doubt (Book)
- Last Chance to See (Book)
- Parrots, the Universe and Everything (YouTube)
- Learning through mistakes: From Einstein to Edison (Article)
- Learning requires confusion (Article)
- Douglas Adams (Wikipedia)
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