Your Experience is a Myth

We’re often told that experience is our best teacher. We feel emboldened when we have direct experience to apply to any situation. We’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends!

But, our experience is often a myth. (Literally, there’s a book about it and you need to read it. At least everyone whose work or life involves inspiring or convincing anyone of anything should read it.)

Experience is limited. We overestimate its value. We ignore the variables. We oversimplify.

We use our experiences to build stories that reinforce the wrong answers while believing we’ve been given the right ones. We use them to generate cause-and-effect relationships that are skewed or that aren’t real at all.

We make all sorts of decisions based on the myth of our own experience. Including our buying decisions.

Imagine what happens when we use our own experiences to decide how to convince our buyers of...anything.   

Our experience includes way too much information about what we’re selling and why it exists. This is true whether we’re in marketing or sales, and especially for founders. 

A certain set of our buyers don’t yet know (or care) that we exist. Another set isn’t yet convinced to buy from us. Yet another set needs to be convinced to keep buying from us. They all come with their own experiences. And myths they’ve turned into realities. 

So we can’t use our own experience to drive our buyers’ actions. At least not solely. And we certainly can’t judge our buyers’ reasoning based on our own experience or knowledge.

We have to meet our buyers where they are, and accept where they are. Our buyers’ motivations are rational and valid, whatever they are, simply because they are what they are, built on their experiences. And this applies both to the people who decide to buy from us and the people who don’t. 

To get yourself outside of the myth of your own experience, ask yourself these questions. (I modified these from that book mentioned above.)

• Is there something important missing from my experience that I need to uncover if I hope to fully understand the choices my buyer is making, and what matters to them?

• What irrelevant details are present in my experience that I need to ignore to avoid being distracted from what’s really happening in my buyer’s mind?

When you ask yourselves these questions, you’re trying to figure out what experiences are feeding into how your buyers understand things like:

• the problem you can help them solve

• the options they have to solve that problem

• whether they do or don’t trust you or providers of services like yours

• the assumptions they’re making about what they’ll gain (or not) from solving this problem

You’re also trying to identify the gap between the myths you’ve spun for yourself out of your experience and the myths your buyers have spun for themselves out of their experience.

When we think about the buyer based on our own experience, we think about what they would or should think and feel if they just understood our product better. Because we have so much experience with it.

I often run into this in conversations with sales teams, and in my brand strategy interviews. When I ask questions about the buyers, I push back on anything that sounds more like what we think they should think or say than what they do.

It’s hard to push back on your own assumptions. Or step outside of the myths of your own experience. But it’s the only way.