The Ability to Apply Life Lessons

Dialogues

Life lessons are the essence of what is beneficial and what is harmful in certain human behaviors, especially those experienced by some as a direct result of their voluntary actions. The major challenge facing some individuals in today’s turbulent world is possessing effective personal ability to apply life lessons in practice, and to benefit from them in living the present and preparing adequately for the future. Among the factors that develop and enhance this important ability, we mention the following:

- Life lessons guide appropriate thinking: Those who learn from life lessons should choose their thinking based on the insights and lessons they have gained, leading them to adopt an effective mode of thinking that aligns with their real-life circumstances. The wise person anticipates early on the consequences of their reactions and the subsequent actions that follow, according to changing surrounding conditions, and chooses what they believe is practical, effective, and beneficial in the long term. They do not measure their life’s destiny solely based on what is customary, but rather adapt or change their thinking in a way that ensures their survival and continuity.

- Thinking beyond collective thought: A genuine and effective life lesson is one that occasionally pushes you to transcend in your thinking what is familiar among the majority of those around you, especially if it becomes evident that collective thinking fails, delays progress, and does not create new opportunities for greater life success. Benefiting from life lessons in this regard begins with practicing critical thinking.

- Intellectual and psychological flexibility: A person’s ability to benefit from life lessons is ensured by possessing traits of flexible thinking and psychological adaptability, which lead to overall flexibility and a rapid change in habitual behaviors and viewpoints, enabling them to consistently achieve their aspirations and goals. In contrast, intellectual rigidity and psychological stagnation lead to failure.

- Applying life lessons: The wise and conscious person applies what they have learned from life lessons by completely stopping the repetition of previous intellectual and behavioral mistakes, discarding failed relationships, and building their life plans according to the life lessons they have understood and internalized. “The wise person judges what they have not seen in the world by what they have already seen.”

A Kuwaiti writer