Last weekend, I had what I would consider to be a compelling shower thought. What is the difference between experience and knowledge?
Although a seemingly silly question, it does have importance. For example, why can't one soak up all the available knowledge on a subject and thus fast-track their experience? If experience is about gaining knowledge, why does reading real estate books not make you a proficient real estate operator?
What I came up with is that experience is a different form of knowledge.
What is Experience?
I see gaining experience as acquiring what I call nuggets. A nugget is information that can only be obtained through imperfect action.
A great example of a nugget would be this tweet by Moses Kagan:
https://x.com/moseskagan/status/1730670779459924367?s=20
You would unlikely find a nugget like this in a book. However, the only other way to learn this nugget is by making this mistake. In this case, on one of Moses' properties, he most likely made this mistake with a bathroom. The other way he could have learned this nugget is how you and I learned it through the sharing of nuggets with other people.
Examples of Some Real Estate Nuggets:
You can hire a tax abatement lawyer to reduce your real estate taxes.
You can ask banks to lower your rate rather than refinancing.
HVAC contractors typically leave trash on your roof, clogging your drains.
Permit expeditors exist and will fast-track your permits through the permitting process.
These examples are pretty simple if you have been in the business for a few years. However, these examples are too specific to be found in a book.
When we classify experience like this, it starts to demystify the allure of experience. Often, we see experience only being acquired after a preset amount of time. However, we can significantly exacerbate our experience rate when we classify it in this manner.
Rather than working X amount of years in an industry, we can instead focus on acquiring as many nuggets of information as possible.
We can do this by failing ourselves and learning through our mistakes. Or we can learn more nuggets by befriending already established operators and constantly exchanging unique information with them. Twitter has also opened up an avenue to learn nuggets from operators. I have acquired many valuable nuggets on Twitter, which is one of the main reasons I spend my time there.
Acquiring nuggets allows us to act in the proper way when we are faced with difficult decisions. The more nuggets you have, the more situations you know how to act on.
The more situations you know how to handle, the better you will be as an operator.
Thoughts:
Although this one was short, I decided to share it anyway. This thought process helped me understand the true nature of experience.
Now that you can quantify the experience, you can pursue it more aggressively. So get out there, meet people, and acquire nuggets from them. Frame your questions on how you can earn more nuggets rather than asking questions that can be found in a textbook.
Doing this will allow you to fast-track your experience.
Thanks for reading. If you have any thoughts or want to reach out, please message me on substack or email me.
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