Some hardship is inevitable. But other hardship is avoidable. Life has enough necessary hardship of its own, so we should do everything we can to avoid its useless twin, unnecessary hardship.
That’s where wisdom comes in handy.
“There are three kinds of men,” said American humorist Will Rogers. “The ones that learn by readin’. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”[i]
Let’s think about these three kinds of men. First, I lump Rogers’ “readers” and “observers” into the same category. They learn from the experiences of others by observing, listening, and seeking wisdom. By reading and observing, they get vicarious experience. They watch what others do, sympathize and empathize, and take a lesson from it.
Then there’s the second category of Rogers’ men, the “urinators.” They don’t learn by vicarious experience, but by direct experience, meaning, from the things that happen directly to them.
Life offers two basic ways to learn: the easy way and the hard way. Vicarious experiences (reading about electric fence urinators and observing electric fence urinators) enable us to learn the easy way. Direct experiences (urinating on the fences ourselves) make us learn the hard way.
Let’s say Chris walks too close to the edge of a cliff, falls off, breaks his leg, and spends three months in a cast. That’s a direct experience for Chris, and the lesson is steer clear of the edge. This is an expensive lesson for Chris. It costs a lot of pain, a lot of money in the form of lost wages and hospital bills, and a lot of lost time. Chris learned the hard way from direct experience.
But say we hear about Chris’s situation or even see Chris fall. We get the same lesson as Chris. We get a vicarious experience that doesn’t cost us anything but our attention. We learn the easy way.
The strange thing is that we tend to neglect easy learning and opt by default for hard learning. The easy way requires small-immediate payments of attention, regular investments into wisdom. But paying attention is still paying, and most of us skip the bill. We refuse to pay the small price right now, so we pay big later on.
Is the Electric Fence Story for Real?
Here’s a clip of someone peeing on the electric fence, and what happens next.
[i] Nina Colman, The Friars Club Bible of Jokes, Pokes, Roasts, and Toasts (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2001), p. 316.