On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In her recent release, Secrets of Adulthood, bestselling author Gretchen Rubin shares witty and thought-provoking reflections. Here’s one of my favorites:

Experience is a great teacher, but make sure that you’re not learning the wrong lesson.

In Aesop’s famous fable, the Hare challenged the Tortoise to a race. The Tortoise agreed, they set the course, and at the signal, they both started off. The Hare bounded ahead, but because he was so sure of winning, he stopped to take a nap. Meanwhile, the Tortoise plodded on. The Hare woke with a start just as the Tortoise was crossing the finish line.

The traditional moral of the fable is “Slow and steady wins the race.” But wouldn’t a more fitting moral be “Those with great gifts can be defeated by their own arrogance and idleness”? Or “Overconfidence fosters carelessness”? Or, as Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach wrote, “Since its famous victory over the hare, the tortoise thinks it’s a sprinter”—in other words, it’s easy to attribute a victory to our own abilities, when in fact we won due to circumstances or someone else’s mistakes.

Wisdom comes from discerning the truest lesson from an experience.

Source: Secrets of Adulthood, pp. 125-126