What Are Experiences?

Webster’s Dictionary Definition of Experiences -

• Events or occurrences that leave an impression on someone.

Experiential Billionaire’s Definition of Experiences -

• Events or happenings in life that are encountered, undergone, or lived through, and that when taken collectively make up a person’s life story.

There’s one thing you have that no one else in the world has: Your own first-person experience of life. Yesterday you saw a sequence of things and experienced a sequence of emotions that is, quite literally, unique.

You’ve led a life that is yours and yours only. There are experiences you’ve had that are unique to you. There are insights to be drawn from some of those experiences that are absolutely worth sharing. You just have to figure out which ones. 

We don’t seek the painful experiences that forge our identities, but we do seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. The good times make an impression on us - but so do our struggles. We wouldn’t be who we are without both our great fortunes and our equally great misfortunes to help drive our search for meaning.

Experiencing requires becoming something new, something more, or at least something different - not just remaining in a static state of existence. That’s far preferable to waiting, endlessly, for the magical arrival of your happiness. That’s far preferable to an arrogant, static, unchanging existence, while resentment and unlived life build around you.

There is too much to be done and too little time in which to do.

You get an idea for who a person is based on the experiences they have had. 

Let’s test this theory out.

Here’s a list of some good experiences -

• Trekked with silverback gorillas through a hailstorm
• Gave hearing aids to thousands of people on 4 different continents
• Started a family
• Trained to be a samurai
• Danced with the northern lights in subzero temps
• Camped in dozens of National Parks
• Got married
• Came face to face with a hungry lion on safari
• Went hot air ballooning
• Were interviewed on the Today Show and Good Morning America
• Sold products in Nordstrom, Barneys, Whole Foods and other leading retailers
• Backpacked through Southeast Asia
• Distributed clean water in Haiti
• Attended dozens of the biggest music festivals in the world
• Quit a good job to start a new career
• Did stand up comedy
• Drove up the coast of Mexico from Acapulco to Arizona
• Designed and produced a clothing line
• Hosted live on-air segments at QVC
• Attended Farm School
• Foraged for seaweed
• Learned how to surf
• Appeared on the front page of the biggest newspaper in Korea
• Rehabbed an old saloon in California Wine Country
• Volunteered at a foodbank on Thanksgiving
• Hosted annual fundraisers for victims of sex trafficking
• Stayed at the oldest scotch distillery in Scotland
• Learned how coffee was grown in Costa Rica
• Motorbiked through rice paddies
• Took flying lessons
• Panned for gold
• Toured the United Nations
• Learned life lessons from the Maasai Mara tribesmen
• Went dog sledding on a glacier
• Swam with massive sharks
• Wrote a manuscript
• Drove cross country
• Went truffle hunting
• Went ACTUAL hunting
• Shot a commercial with Google
• Judged a contest that awarded a million dollars to the best new business idea
• Hosted the first silent disco at 35,000 feet on a flight where Questlove DJ’d
• Sold millions of units of products we designed ourselves
• Went skydiving, cliff diving and bungee jumping
• Went backcountry snowboarding and snowmobiling
• Visited all 50 U.S. states
• Named Forbes and Inc Magazine’s 30 Under 30
• Were on the biggest billboard in the Dominican Republic
• Did a European road trip
• Built schools in Guatemala
• Learned how to trapeze

And here’s a list of some bad experiences -

• Got divorced
• Filed bankruptcy
• Totaled a car
• Broke bones
• Lost giant business deals
• Had pets die
• Got extremely ill
• Cared for a loved one through end of life hospice care
• Helped a family member fight (and lose to) cancer
• Got fired
• Fought addiction
• Went to jail
• Got cheated on
• Lost friends to suicide
• Got hit by a car
• Got robbed
• Failed job interviews
• Crashed motorbikes
• Attacked by a dog
• Lived through a global pandemic
• Battled depression
• Watched parents get divorced
• Experienced a miscarriage

Well, as you probably have guessed, that’s us.

As you can see, we’ve had very unique experiences and very common experiences, very positive experiences and very negative experiences. And these are obviously just the short list that will help you to see that our experiences combine together to make up some of our most important memories and life defining moments.

We are proud of the woven quilt of experiences we’ve created. In short, we place value on experiences not based on the perceived cool factor or outside recognition, but instead based on our own interpretation of those experiences and how they made us who we are.

To make it more abundantly clear, while some of the bigger experiences that tend to stick or just be told more often involve travel or accomplishments that others can relate and aspire to, those are in no way the benchmark for what experiences are or need to be to find happiness and fulfillment.

There are many great examples of equally important types of experiences that can and should be had by those seeking enrichment, all of which are easily attainable and disproportionately fulfilling to their seeming mundaneness and that do not require vast amounts of either time or money, only planning. 

We encourage you to build your own life story from the experiences that inspire you.