At the 1980 Olympics, all six finalists in the men’s foil fencing were left-handed.
This is surprising given that left-handers make up only about 10% of the population. The same pattern appears in boxing, table tennis and baseball. Left-handers do particularly well in sports where competitors directly interact.
Author David Epstein explores this in a video called Why Left Handed People Win More. His explanation isn’t that left-handers are stronger or faster; it’s that they’re unfamiliar.
Most athletes spend most of their lives competing against right-handed opponents and that experience trains them to anticipate right-handed movements. Then a left-hander turns up and everything is reversed.
Experience doesn’t just teach us what to do. It trains us in what to expect.
I’m left-handed, which is probably why Epstein’s video caught my attention. But it also caught it for a second reason.
Experience doesn’t only shape what we see; it also gives us something to work with. And those are two different capabilities.
A vivid example of this appeared recently on Alone Australia. One of the participants was trying to catch fish from the shore. But it wasn’t working.
He could have kept doing what his experience had taught him: fish harder, fish longer, try another spot. Instead, he changed the problem. If he couldn’t reach the fish from the land, perhaps he needed to get onto the water.
So he built a kayak. Which was interesting because he’d never built one before. He had to take what he knew about fishing, water, construction and the materials available to him and reorganise that experience around a problem he hadn’t encountered before.
He wasn’t simply repeating his experience; he was working with it.
That’s a potentially big idea.
Imagine two people with twenty years of experience in the same profession. Both encounter the same problem and recognise the same pattern.
One says: “I’ve seen this before. Here’s what to do.”
The other says: “I’ve seen something like this before. What else could we do with it?”
Neither person necessarily has more experience; the difference is what they do with it. One uses experience to recognise the familiar while the other works with experience to generate another possibility.
Experience is a little like money in the bank. Having capital is valuable, but having capital and knowing how to put it to work are two different capabilities. Thirty years of experience tells me something about what you’ve accumulated but it doesn’t necessarily tell me what you can do with it.
This changes what ‘applying our experience’ means. It’s not simply repeating what we know, but putting experience to work in situations it wasn’t originally designed for. Adapting it, combining it, transferring it, testing it against something new. And sometimes it’s knowing when previous experience doesn’t apply at all.
Perhaps this is the two-part nature of experience: it shapes what we see, and then we can learn to work with what it has taught us to see.
Experience trains us to recognise the familiar and its greater value may come when we learn to do something unfamiliar with what we’ve learned.
What have you learned from experience that you’ve been able to use somewhere it wasn’t originally learned?
More Field Notes
This is Field Note #22. Field Notes are observations from my ongoing enquiry into experience. To learn more about how to make the most of your experience, read these posts next:
