Judgment without experience

I’ve long been fascinated by the intricate relationship that exists between judgment and experience and I’m not finished yet.

The essence of that relationship is found in Nasreddin’s expression, that 13th century Sufi: “Good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.”

This time, I just wanted to cover what happens when we make decisions based only on the best experience we have and when the circumstances are such that they create brand new situations that are simply bad or for which we’re totally unprepared.

When this happens, we don’t have any experience to pull from and we must literally think on our feet to come up with a plan good enough that it will get us out of a pickle, assure our survival and enable us to add one more terrible experience to our existing tool-box and further enhance the quality of our judgment.

It's never pleasant, certainly not comfortable, but it wakes us up, forces us to stretch a bit further out than we were ready or willing to, and in the end, make us much stronger.