Similarly, I've noticed that proverbs and aphorisms only become useful after you've been burned by violating them a bunch of times. It's weird because you can be told them and understand what they mean immediately, but just because you understand what they mean doesn't make them meaningful. Or something. It's almost like you aren't able to fully grok the proverb until you have a certain outlook on life or the right schemas or perspectives, but it's impossible to gain those just by hearing the original saying.
(This is really hard to describe for some reason, I feel like I'm missing a word or a concept or something. Perhaps something to do with constructivism.)
That can be explained, in part at least, by the fact that proverbs are often oversimplifying overgeneralizations, contradictory with each other, such that for every situation in life there is at least one proverb that seems like it 'would have helped'... and a bunch of others that would have been unhelpful or misleading. At hindsight time, our pattern-craving minds are more eager to recall the truisms that best apply.
It's an instance of a more general pattern: your rational mind is superseded by another, more primitive part of you, which really only understands one type of "argument"--Pavlovian conditioning. A lot of things started to make sense when I began viewing myself this way (e.g. willpower).
The second major revelation was that this primitive part should not be dismissed as weakness or a useless carryover from a different evolutionary era. I know that in my case, if I always acted in ways that seemed perfectly rational to me at the time, with nothing inhibiting me, I'd be dead many times over by now.
Yeah, but why? Why should it be true? Logically I see no reason why experience should matter, but it clearly does. I should be able to just read a proverb and grok it and be better off for it, but I can't, it doesn't work that way. Why?
I should be able to just read a proverb and grok it and be better off for it, but I can't
Maybe proverbs are more tags than content, like labels on bottles: the label tells you what's in the bottle, but to absorb it you have to drink the contents.
If that's right, then proverbs' main value is in retrospect - i.e. they help to organize experience and talk about it, but not to replace it. I know I've sometimes snorted at a proverb as being totally obvious, or a useless cliche, only to get hammered by experience and later go, "Oh, so that's what it meant."
For things in the realm of an idealized problem solving domain, say mathematics or chess, you can learn a lot from a proverb. But many insights in life can't be reduced to writing, especially those involving either self-mastery or other people (and startups, alas, involve both).
If you read the history of an event how does that compare to living through it? Can you learn to ride a bike from a book? The challenge with a startup--like many other things in life--is that you need to integrate many different inputs, your own hopes and fears among them, and negotiate a working consensus with your co-founders.
How about, if you think about something all the time, you'll be thinking about it when it's relevant, and so it'll influence your actions. If you don't, you won't be, and it won't. And one thing we think about a lot is certain past events.
I think we don't take advice seriously at first due to the sacrifices we have to make to truly embrace it. Advice gets crap-filtered. This is as it should be, because at first you don't really know if it's good advice -- maybe that proverb just doesn't apply in this situation, maybe it's just something that sounds reasonable but isn't actually true, etc.
You can be told, "look both ways before you cross the street," but it takes being hit by a car to really convince you to make the sacrifice of abandoning your current thought process whenever you approach a road.
(This is really hard to describe for some reason, I feel like I'm missing a word or a concept or something. Perhaps something to do with constructivism.)