advantageExperience

Instance 1
Once one of my mentors told me there can be just 3 types of person in this world.
1. The person who learn by their experience (good or bad)
2. The person who do not learn
3. The person who learn from others experience.
He added that the person falling in 3rd category shall be the most successful person as he saves time in not making mistakes and does right thing himself . Thus reaching his career goal faster than anybody else. Though he said the 3rd category people are rare as learning from others experience is the most difficult thing. It is like till you actually put a lemon drop on your tounge you will never feel it is sour. But if you dont like why do yo wanna taste it anyways.

Instance 2
Other day while peeking into someones person life@orkut. i found an interesting quote. It goes like this " while walking forward on a unknown path to reach a target always ask person who is coming backwards on that path".
Instance 3
And today i was reading a book called "A Case of a bonsai manager". the book stated that the people can learn better in life when they are put with experienced people. the author gave numerous examples and the most relevant to me was the TAS managers assisting MDs and Presidents en-route to become one among them.

There was a similarity in all the three instances. All the 3 highlighted the importance of learning from others experience. First instance narrator was a able Psychiatrist. Second one was narrated by a novice professional and 3rd one by board of directors of large conglomerate. so quite a broad range of stake holders stating a same fact. This really makes a perfect sense. During my professional journey till now i has had several experiences which my experienced fellow informed and happened. Though that is a separate issue whether i respected their decision or not.
My only word of caution to all reader (if any :)) is that to compare situation and environment of other's previous experience with the your situation in hand. In our consulting engagements though we have similar nature of engagements, we do "Situation analysis" and "Surround consideration analysis" in each of them. This is to avoid bad decisions based on our previous experience which might not be applicable to this new and different situation.