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Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, Alhamdulillahi Rabbil ‘Alameen, wa salatu wa salamu ala ashrafil abiyai wal mursaleen, Muhammad wa Rasulullah ﷺ, Tasliman kathiran kathira.
Fahamabadu, my brothers and sisters, we are looking at what I call my four truths. Time passes, liking does not matter. These are the two things we spoke about. Today I want to talk about the third thing, which is that there are two ways to learn. The lessons of life, there are two ways to learn. One is by making mistakes yourself. And two, by learning from others’ mistakes. Of course, there are people who make mistakes and still don’t learn; that’s a different issue. I’m talking about people who have some intelligence. So, learn by making mistakes yourself, or learn by learning from others’ mistakes.
The first one, which is learning by making mistakes yourself, is risky, it’s costly, and it’s painful. The second one, learning from others’ mistakes, is simple and free. But guess which one most people choose? To learn from others, you need humility, you need goal clarity, you need to be clear about why you are listening. You need to take notes, you need to ask for clarification if necessary. What doesn’t help is a know-it-all attitude, impatience, disrespect towards the teacher, and imagining that you can remember everything, or relying on voice and video recording. This is a very big fitna we have today, where we think that we can just record the voice or record the video, and that’s enough. I can almost guarantee you that nobody who records the video will watch that whole video again. Nobody. The key is to be in the situation and learn in the situation.
So, the first thing where you make a mistake yourself… Now, nobody deliberately goes and makes a mistake. A mistake is a result of one or two things. Either it’s the result of risk-taking, which is a good thing. You take a chance, you take a risk, and it doesn’t work out, so you fail. That’s a mistake. But then you don’t allow that to be a waste of experience, a waste of life. You analyze that mistake. And you say, “What was I trying to do?” “What were the different options available to me?” Now, you go back there and think in your mind. You go back there and say, “Well, what else could I have done? What were the different things available to me?” Why did I choose the one I chose? And the key thing in all of this is to be absolutely brutally honest with yourself. When you ask, “Why did I choose? Why did I choose what I chose?” If you spend your time then justifying that choice, then you are stupid. Obviously, the choice was bad. I mean, you can call it what you want. But if the choice was good, you would not be sitting here making that analysis. The fact that you are making analysis means that that was a bad choice. Right?
Now, how can you convert that into a positive experience? And that is by being clear in your mind, by being brutally honest with yourself, by not justifying a bad choice. So, what was I trying to do? What were the options available to me? I chose option A instead of option B or C. Why did I choose option A? What prevented me from choosing B or C? All this analysis must be done. And all of this must be done on paper with a pen. If you are not writing it down, believe me, you are not learning. You are not learning anything. Forget gadgets. Gadgets are worthless. You have to write things down. Then, you say, “What is my learning from this?” That’s the key. This is the essence. Conceptualizing. What did I learn from this? What is my learning? Right? Now, once you get that learning, the next time around, you apply that learning. So, you have a concrete experience. Which is the mistake. Then, we have what we call reflective observation. In your mind, you reflect, you observe yourself at that time: why, what, and not? And then, you have abstract conceptualization where you conceptualize the lesson that you derive from this. And then, you have active experimentation where you try out that lesson. And you say, “Okay, now that I have this insight, I am trying it out.” So, this is what you must do with your own mistakes.
And as I said, the second way of learning is from others. Now, this can be in different ways. You can read a book. You can talk to somebody. You can go attend a class. You know, you can maybe reflect on what happened in life and in society and so on. So, different ways. But where, effectively, you are learning from the mistakes of others. And when you learn from those mistakes, again, the same thing. What was the mistake the other person made? What was the result of that? And if I had been in that position, what were the options? What would I have chosen? Why did that person not choose those things? Right? It takes some effort. But that’s how you learn. Experience. Experience is extremely, extremely important. Rasulullah ﷺ said, لَيْسَ الْخَبَرُ كَالْمُعَيَّنَةِ. He said, “The experience is not the same as information; it is not the same as observing yourself.” You are told about something. He said, “It’s not the same as going and seeing it yourself.” So, it is very important to experience something in its context and understand from that. And that’s why they say, experience is not what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you.
So, experience is not a function of age. It’s not a matter of saying, “I’m 60, 70, 50, 80, whatnot. Therefore, I must be known.” Experience is not a function of age. Experience is a function of what you do with whatever happened to you. So, that is something which does not come just with age, but with conscious learning. Learning happens when only, as I mentioned, which is when you do these four things: concrete experience, reflect objectively (which we call reflective observation), construct multiple concepts and lessons (which we call abstract conceptualization), and test your hypothesis (which we call active experimentation). The experienced person does all this on their own and shares the fruit of that with you.
So, when somebody is giving you some advice, whoever… many of us who have parents, who have grandparents, right? You have literally, if you combine their ages, over a century of experience available to you free of cost, sitting there in your house. Many elderly people; they’re waiting, they’re yearning for somebody to come and listen to them. But we waste it, right? We waste it. We don’t spend any time with them. We don’t talk to them. We don’t listen to them. We get bored because we have the attention span of goldfish thanks to scrolling screens. So, we have no time to listen to them. And that entire century of experience, which was your heritage, is trashed. Who loses? Not the old man. The old man who’s sitting there, not your grandfather or your father. He lived his life. You. You could have learned from all that. Wasted. Similarly with teachers. Similarly with books. Imagine, a book is this flat object, as somebody said, which, when you open it, it transports you into another time and space where you see things which you have never seen before. And you could not have seen, because that book was written a hundred years ago, right? If you read Plato’s Republic, you’re reading a book which was written 2000 years ago. You couldn’t even go back there if you wanted. But you can, for free. You can see the world through the eyes of somebody who lived at the time. And then you can draw parallels from there to your world today. This is the purpose of history. The whole idea of history is to be able to transport you to the future. To a time and space, which was long before yours, and then help you to draw parallels to your time and space today. Because humans are humans. Human desires are human desires. Human aspirations, goals, fears, apprehensions; all these are the same. They don’t change because you have a different technology in your hand today. They are all the same.
So how can we live a life which is qualitatively superior to the other? To the life which was led before by our predecessors, whoever they were. How can we do that? By reading about them. So we need to have the humility to value the experience that our elders, our teachers, writers, who have written books and so on, what they bring for us. So listen respectfully, thank them and show them that you are using what they gave you. Show respect in every way because they are sharing their life with you while you have nothing to give them in return. You must have this sense of understanding. You can’t do anything with them. What can you do for them? Like today, for example, if I am sitting and teaching people who are in their twenties, what can you do for me? You can’t do anything for me because by the time you get old enough to do something for me, I will be dead. So, what will you do for me? Why am I even teaching you? As far as I am concerned, if I don’t have a sense—I would like to leave, help people, I would like to give them a hand up because I know the kind of dumb stuff they are doing, where it will lead them—and I can help them. If I didn’t have that sense of responsibility, I can say I am wasting my time because why am I spending my time talking to young people when those young people collectively can’t do anything for me? You don’t have the money to pay me today. By the time you get the money, I won’t be here. What can you teach me? You can’t teach me anything. You are just starting your life. So, what will I learn from you?
So, that humility is required. When I am saying, “I am not talking about myself,” I am saying anyone who is older than you and who has the sense of responsibility, as we teach you, is really giving you charity. So, you are sitting there receiving charity; so show that. Show that humility because without showing that humility you get nothing. And I am telling you because this is how I learnt. I would go and sit at the feet of people and I would sit for hours. There were some people I spent days together in their places, in their khanqa or whatever you want to call it. Sitting on stone floors. I mean, this was here. We didn’t have air conditioning and carpets in those days. You sat on a stone floor. There was not even a fan. Mercifully, the world was cooler than now. But, still, heat is heat. That’s how you learn. You learn, you take notes and then you conceptualize and so on and so on.
So, I remind myself and you: it’s very important. If you want to learn life’s lessons, humility is the first thing that is required. Be humble before the teacher. Whoever the teacher might be. And, show that humility and then you get to learn. We ask Allah Ta’ala to make us people who can learn and who don’t make costly mistakes unnecessarily. They need not make those mistakes if they learn. And we ask Allah Ta’ala to help us to learn and to help us to apply those learning knowledge. May Allah bless us. May Allah bless His and His heirs.