Vicarious experience

Me: "Read books!!"

Mr.X : " Why? I read enough till college".

Me: "You can learn something"

Mr.Y : "I know enough to deal with my life "

Mr Z : " I don't have time".


Sure I replied back with reasonable answers like " Even Albert Einstein had the same 24 hrs". But, I didn't have the right one until recently a thought occurred to me.

A person forms opinions or beliefs based on incidents, circumstances and experiences. There are direct experiences and indirect or vicarious experiences. Obviously, direct ones dominate in forming those opinions and beliefs.

I have a friend who is well bred. He is very lucky to get that type of behavior because of the upbringing and the surroundings he lives. But I bet every one can't be as lucky as he is.

And I have other friend who had some bad experiences with the people surrounding him, so there is a chance of taking this experience to generalize or to have a no good general perception of the world.

I have seen people who formed their belief system based solely on their own experiences or perceptions from those experiences. I am not saying it's wrong. But the problem is those people generalized those views and began to make logical decisions based on those.

Edward de Bono has noted " 90% of our errors of logic at all but errors of perception. Logic cannot control perception. Logic within a system cannot determine the starting point of the system. This hyper emphasis on logic has two disastrous effects. The first is that we have paid insufficient attention to perception and the second is that we have the highly dangerous 'feeling' of being right-when we have selected the perceptions".

I asked to my friend, who is more silent, obedient, reserved, and not open for friends, some months ago about his behavior. My doubt was whether he behaved the same since the start or something bad happened. He told me that something happened and he got hurt. And he formed opinions and he generalized those views about the world around him. He built a barrier around himself, not to let anyone enter or preventing him to come out of it.

I do not know whether he made a right choice or wrong.

I understand how much acute agony those experiences create. And those experiences have the power to create upside down everything.

One way is questioning the belief system like being skeptical about one's own beliefs. And experimenting oneself with more experiences.

So, the point is to have a way of perceiving is to have more experiences. But, common sense says you can't get all the experiences by doing it yourself.

This leads us to VICARIOUS learning.

"There is a limit as to how much one can learn from one's own experience. As a famous quote goes, the man who learns from his own experience is destined to continue learning from his own experience."- Prof. Sanjay bakshi.

Reading books is the best way. And read books of the extreme people is very good to get to know various experiences. And I think watching good movies is also a good way in attaining wisdom.

I am not saying to read only non-fiction, psychology e.t.c. What I meant is " Try reading books!"

Finally, It's not that my perceptions are 100% right. But I follow this principle:
"It is better to be roughly right, than to be precisely wrong" -John Maynard Keynes.

To all the people, who think like we-stopped-reading-after-college,please read this quote.

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think” 
― Socrates

"The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you."

-- Tony Robbins