Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

Why do peo­ple always say if you’ve had a par­tic­u­larly bad expe­ri­ence that you should “learn from it?” Do they really mean it?

It’s not always pos­si­ble to grow from some­thing. Espe­cially if that bad expe­ri­ence lasts longer than say five min­utes. (I want to make it clear I’m not speak­ing about truly bad expe­ri­ences like abuse.)

That’s not to say that bad expe­ri­ences can’t toughen you and make you more resilient the next time they hap­pen. For exam­ple being laid off after an account loss sev­eral years ago made me tougher. But is that really growth? Maybe it is but it’s not the kind I’m inter­ested in.

Where is this going? I’d like to make the case that it’s impor­tant to stop try­ing to make the most of every expe­ri­ence and rec­og­nize them for what they are good, bad or just not very valu­able. Whether they’re friend­ships, jobs, clients, work rela­tion­ships, or an auto­mo­bile they should be eval­u­ated. Then we should change the neg­a­tive ones, deal with them, or change how you deal with them.

Your time, your energy and your pas­sion deserve more than to be drained for naught. Some­thing like a bad job or rel­a­tive can’t always be avoided. But you can focus your pas­sion on the things that give the most back. For exam­ple, social media gives a lot back to me. That’s why it gets as much energy as I can put into it.

Writ­ing email copy gives back less, par­tially because I’ve been doing it for so long. I’ve already gained most of the learn­ing. That doesn’t mean I don’t do it with the same pro­fes­sion­al­ism, I just don’t expect it to be the same learn­ing expe­ri­ence and have the same depth.

Pho­tog­ra­phy is the same – a sim­ple stu­dio prod­uct shot gets an hour, where a loca­tion shot with mul­ti­ple sub­jects gets much more time.

What do you think? Is part of what you do daily drain­ing? Other things reward­ing? Do you think every task deserves the same dedication?