From a friend of a friend and sent to a friend, who replied “Your friend is a ninja.”
‘Struth.
GOOD JUDGMENT CAN’T BE BOUGHT OR LEARNED FROM BOOKS. PEOPLE AREN’T BORN WITH IT, AND IT ISN’T TAUGHT IN SCHOOL. ONLY SELF-AWARENESS AND VAST KNOWLEDGE OF CIRCUMSTANCES, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND POTENTIALITIES, WHEN COMBINED WITH PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, RESULT IN GOOD JUDGMENT. MENTORS CAN SPEED THE PROCESS, SUPPLYING INFORMATION AND EVEN EXPERIENCE THROUGH THE ARTFULLY TOLD STORY. OTHERWISE, THE BURNED HAND TEACHES BEST.
GOOD JUDGMENT IS THE RESULT OF EXPERIENCE, WHILE AN “EXPERIENCE” IS THE RESULT OF POOR JUDGMENT.
——Mark Twight, Extreme Alpinism
4 responses so far ↓
1 Nobilis // Mar 27, 2008 at 3:35 am
I’d be curious to hear how MT defines “good judgement.”
I have a completely unsupportable suspicion that it would boil down to “making decisions the same way I do.”
If so, then the statement in this quote is rather facile; anyone who learned how to make decisions the same way he did is likely to make decisions the same way he does.
2 regina lynn // Mar 27, 2008 at 1:18 pm
I think in a more general sense, he’s right, though. That experience teaches, “failure” teaches, and that we can’t be perfect out of the box — it takes (at least) a lifetime to figure it out, through mistakes and suffering and regrets.
I posted it because a friend and I have both been feeling stupid lately about things that we think we should have known better — but we didn’t, because we were 21 and 17, respectively, when we did what we did. And now that we’re older we realized that actually we couldn’t have known better because we hadn’t had that experience yet, and didn’t even know enough to know that we didn’t know and therefore to ask someone….
3 Nobilis // Mar 27, 2008 at 3:30 pm
In that sense, it makes sense… clearly, you can’t be expected to have known something you had no way to know.
4 Seth // Mar 27, 2008 at 8:09 pm
…everyone is a geek to someone … Maybe the person you compare yourself to doesn’t share your definition of fitness, or happiness or health.
- Mark Twight