Experience vs Progress

A couple of days ago I had a conversation with someone who used to work with my Father. He’s a really nice guy with an excellent understanding of marketing and, well, life! I was telling him that I had recently started an online business. He then went on to ask me a very interesting question: “Are you at the point of experience of progress?”

Anyone who starts anything new encounters these two things, usually experience then progress. This is particularly applicable to someone starting out online. With all the rubbish that’s out there, it’s easy to get stuck in the “experience” section for longer than we want to. My rule now is that I only buy software that is useful for this blog or my business, I don’t buy any of these one-week wonders stating that you’ll make “34,416.62 per month” all for $37, and that’s because of my experience with these type of products.

Everybody quickly wants to get to a point where they are making progress, so I suppose the defining factor is how quickly we can go from experience to progress, or is it? I think that it’s more important to use our experience to initiate progress. Everyone has got to try things out. People like Ryan Critchett and Tim Ferriss will tell you all about the importance of experimentation. But the takeaway is more important than the experiment. What did you learn? How can you use that to propel yourself forward?

Experience is part of trying and starting something new. We shouldn’t try to prevent people getting experience. Plus, have you noticed that you can give them all the advice in the world but they must find out for themselves? Many of our experiences define us and change how we respond to things in the future.

It was definitely a case of experience vs progress here at BeliefandAction.com. Much like my online business, the first couple of months were certainly experience, and now I feel that I’m starting to make progress here on the blog, and that’s all from focussing on community.

There are many great people that I wish I’d come across as soon as I’d created the blog, such as Danny & Peter, Jk, Ryan, Jon, Marcus and Mark, and many more, but it’s funny how things turn out, the two months prior to that are all part of the experience. As soon as I started connecting with these guys, the experience started turning into progress.

So this is a post to say thanks to the guys I connect with, and also to say that we should embrace experiences, but also use them to propel ourselves into progress.

I hope you enjoyed this post, please leave your comments underneath. What stage are you at, experience or progress? How important have your experiences in business been? Have you used these to make progress? Don’t feel compelled to answer these questions, if you just want to leave a comment about the post, you’re more than welcome  .