At school, learning something new also meant to have a quick feedback on the learning itself. Either it was a test, homework being screened or a grade at the end of the year. That’s the result we learned for or learned to expect and achieve.

It doesn’t really change in college or even in business. The association between learning and results remains some kind of measurement.

The quality of the learning itself is rarely investigated. Consequently, there seems to be a lack of incentives to use the learning and thus to concentrate on how the learning evolves and changes what we can achieve with the new knowledge and even more so with the gained experience. The knowledge often being only the information received.

Experience, in contrast, is the learning we create by applying the learning in real life situations. Applying the learning is a risky thing, it challenges us to deal with our expectations of what well achieve, the reactions others will have to it as well as how we’ll feel about these reactions.

In fact, the gap is situated between learning and expected results. A lot of our failures are stories we tell ourselves based on our expectation. I’m not advocating to lower our expectations. What I believe is that we will benefit from understanding the work and learning needed to be able to match our expectations.

The journey tells us where we are and how we progress.

The what (results) and the how (journey) matter.