No Experience = No Substance

On a trip to China, Warren Buffett marveled at a group of young men pulling his boat upstream a river.

After a moment, he had an epiphany:

“There could have been another Bill Gates among these men pulling our boat. They were born here, and they were destined to spend their lives tugging those boots the way they did ours. They didn't have a chance.”

The men in the river became a “haunting” image of destiny & fate that was now etched into Buffet’s mind.

The experience gave his natural disposition to gratitude substance.

“Being grateful” was now given a feeling: a pit in his stomach that he felt whenever he thought of the men in China tugging those boats.

Being prolific doesn’t come at the cost of experience; it comes as a result of it.

After one of the best debut albums of all time, Lauryn Hill felt external pressure to quickly turn in her next album.

After recording a few songs, she shut down production.

“It wasn’t my best because there was no substance. And there was no substance because there was no experience,” she explained. 

While her first album was drawing from her entire life up until that point, the period following that album’s release had no experience aside from touring.

When I was younger, I moved apartments like 10 times. When I got to college, I went to 4 different schools in 3 different states in just 3 years. 

Sure, I read a lot, and have stories from books. That helps.

But I have also done a lot of stupid and cool shit and have very real stories that mean even more to me.

It’s like my friend Nick Bibeau loves to say to aspiring writers:

“Log off, do cool shit, and [write] about it!”

Make time to meet new people and go to new places so that your work – and more importantly, your life – has some substance behind it.

You can never fully understand what you have not experienced or witnessed yourself, which is why people generally tend to be tribal and discriminatory the more isolated they are.

People who never leave home or venture outside of their daily path will never change their minds about anything, and that’s a dangerous way to live.

Not just for anyone outside of their in-group, but for themselves as well.

In a world where you can do so much and be whoever you want, why choose to live it just one way?

Meet new people, feed your life with as much experiences, points of view as you can so that you can feel what it means for someone to have been grieving, poor, discriminated, or successful. 

You can be all these things yourself, but wouldn’t knowing if what you want is even worth getting? 

Without seeking out new experiences or connections, you become a husk devoid of any meaningful substance to bring to the world.

No matter how hard you work, the well will run dry if you don’t make the time to let it fill.