UT.. Two ways to learn

https://youtu.be/PC9zuzh4x3E

Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.
All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and peace and blessings be upon the honour of the prophets and messengers.
Muhammad and the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him and his family and companions, are the most obedient and the most generous.
Dear brothers and sisters, I am doing this series of reminders called Universal Truths.
I call them the Four Truths.
And we spoke about two of them.
What was the first one? Time passes.
First one, time passes. Second one? Leave your likes.
Leave your likes. Liking doesn't matter.
Liking doesn't matter. Right?
Because everything beneficial is usually painful.
So if you say, I will do only what I like, you will never learn anything.
Third, truth.
Truth.
There are two ways to learn life lessons.
There is a smart way and there is a dumb way.
There is a stupid way.
The smart way is to learn from others.
The stupid way is to insist on making the mistakes yourself.
The smart way is smart because what you learn from the other is the extraction, is the learning, is the essence of what he learnt.
He suffered the pain, he suffered the expense.
After the pain, he thought about it, he conceptualized it.
What he is teaching you is the essence of that.
You get it for free.
The stupid way, just because I fell into a hole and I learnt something, does not mean that if you fall into the same hole, you will learn the same thing.
You may learn nothing.
You may just break your leg.
Right?
So it doesn't matter.
It doesn't mean that if you make the same mistake that your father made, you will not learn anything.
It doesn't mean that if you make the same mistake that your father made, your mother made, your uncle made, your teacher made, that you will learn what they learnt.
No.
The learning is not related to the mistake.
The learning is not related to the hole you fell into.
The learning is related to what the person does with that.
Because experience is not what happens to you.
Experience is what you do with what happens to you.
So the learning is not related to the mistake.
Learning from others is simple.
It's free.
And learning, insisting on learning yourself is risky and costly and painful.
But guess which one most people try.
Especially in this culture.
This culture is based on the fact that you are not a person.
On the worship of the self.
This culture is based on what you call raising the self-esteem of the child beyond all reasonable limits.
A child has done nothing.
He's just born practically.
He's in grade A.
Or grade 1 or grade 2 or grade 3.
He's 5 years old, 7 years old.
And he's told, man, you are the best in the world.
Oh, you are fantastic.
So he's already best in the world in grade 1.
Now where does he go from there to?
Right?
If you're already the best, then there's only one direction you can go to, which is downhill, right?
Now obviously, if anyone wants to argue the opposite and say, should we abuse children?
I say, go get your head examined.
I mean, it's not a world of two opposites, right?
Nobody says abuse children.
But this is abuse of children to give them this false impression that they are the best.
They're not the best.
They're nice kids.
So learn.
But to learn from others, you need humility.
You need to be humble.
You need goal clarity.
You need to be clear as to why you are listening to that person.
You can't just sit there and let the sound come.
No.
You must look for things.
You must take notes.
You must ask for clarification if you need clarification.
What does not help is a know-it-all attitude.
Oh, I know everything.
These old people, old fogies, old school, they don't know anything.
They don't know how to talk to people.
They are from back home.
America is a different place.
You've heard all these things, no?
They don't know how to talk to people.
What do I care?
What does not help is impatience.