True Value

Los Angeles is and has been historically considered the nation’s capital of the billboard. It is a leader in street advertising due to its heavy traffic. I spend a lot of my days in the car, driving from client to client, so I spend a lot of time looking at outdoor ads, from billboards to benches to those screens some choose to affix to the roof rack of their cars. It is rare to find something noteworthy in this barrage of advertising, but it happened for me last week.

I pulled up to a red light and noticed a bench ad for a law firm. In large, clean lettering, the bench proclaimed: ”Experience isn’t expensive. It’s priceless.”

This hit me as a reframe, personally and professionally. Time is our only finite resource. So if someone can take the time they have spent gaining experience in an area of value to you, condense it, and transfer, teach, or offer that experience to you, that is priceless indeed. I think of the trainings I have attended and the time I have spent observing and conversing with mentors and how they represent a consolidation of research, trial and error, and lived experience then transferred to me in a much shorter period of time than it took for them to accrue the knowledge.

It also makes me think of the vast difference between experiential learning and learning by lecture or reading. While I don’t remember much of my fifth grade science lectures, I do remember assembling and naming each bone in the human body, building a simple water filter from a 3 liter bottle filled with layers of rocks and sand, or dissecting owl pellets. These experiences have stuck in my brain with greater clarity than thousands of days of ordinary classroom learning. Their longevity in memory speaks to the value of experiencing directly.

And, as someone who offers a service and sets their own pricing, I was reminded that the knowledge and experience I have accrued, and my ability to translate it to others, transcends the value that market pricing places on the work that I do. Strength training with mindfulness of and working towards minimizing chronic pain is priceless to the people who find themselves constantly injured, struggling to build a routine, and doubtful of their ability to move without pain again. Experience isn’t expensive. It’s priceless.