One of the first things we learn about the world is that it doesn't negotiate with us very much.

Touch something hot and your hand moves before you've had time to develop a theory about it.

"Ouch. Hot. No touch."

For a small child, that's enough.

The lesson becomes more complicated as we get older because consequences become harder to interpret. I try something and fail. Someone else tries something similar and succeeds. I take a risk and lose money while somebody else takes what appears to be a larger risk and does very well.

At that point, it's tempting to ask why reality treated us differently.

Sometimes that's exactly the right question. The situations may not have been as similar as they appeared. One person may have had money, connections, training or information the other didn't. Rules may have been applied differently. Luck may have intervened.

Fairness matters because people can treat one another unfairly.

Reality itself presents a different problem.

It gives us consequences without necessarily explaining them.

If I touch a hot stove, the interpretation is easy. The heat caused the pain, and withdrawing my hand is a reasonably good response.

Most adult feedback isn't that clean.

Suppose I start a business and it fails.

What did I learn?

Maybe there wasn't enough demand. Maybe I charged too little. Maybe I expanded too quickly. Maybe I chose the wrong location. Maybe the business was fine and an unexpected event destroyed it. Maybe I made several mistakes and still would have succeeded under slightly different conditions.

Failure tells me something happened.

Figuring out what it tells me requires more work.

This is why I've never particularly liked the saying that whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it leaves us injured. Sometimes we recover without becoming stronger at all.

What an experience can give us is information about a boundary.

Even then, I think the word boundary needs some care.

A boundary discovered today isn't necessarily permanent.

The first time someone lifts a heavy weight, they discover how much they can lift now. Training may move that boundary. A beginning musician discovers what they can't yet play. A business discovers what its current cash flow can't support.

Other boundaries don't move very much.

I can become better at tolerating cold without becoming immune to hypothermia.

Wisdom includes learning the difference.

It also means resisting the urge to turn our own experience into a universal rule.

This is where comparison can become misleading.

"I burned my hand and that other guy got a pony. No fair."

That's a perfectly reasonable complaint if somebody promised both of us ponies.

It's less useful if I touched a stove and he entered a raffle.

The outcomes are different because the situations are different.

Much of life is like that, only the differences are harder to see.

Two people can make apparently similar decisions and encounter very different consequences because they didn't actually begin from the same place. They have different resources, obligations, abilities, histories and tolerances for loss. One person can afford a risk that would be catastrophic for another.

That doesn't mean the first person is superior.

It means risk has context.

This becomes especially important when we try to turn experience into advice.

Someone survives a difficult period and concludes that everyone else should be able to endure the same thing. Another person is badly hurt by an experience and concludes that nobody should ever be exposed to it.

Both have learned something real.

Both can make the mistake of assuming they learned it for everyone.

I've probably done both.

There are things I can tolerate that would be unreasonable to demand from someone else, and there are things I've learned to avoid that another person may be perfectly capable of doing safely.

The challenge is figuring out when experience has revealed something about the world and when it has revealed something about the relationship between this particular person and this particular circumstance.

That distinction changes how we help.

If someone is about to touch a hot stove, telling them it's hot is useful. We don't need to preserve every opportunity for firsthand discovery.

Other situations aren't so obvious.

Sometimes warning someone prevents a disaster. Sometimes our warning is based on conditions that no longer exist. Sometimes helping means giving someone enough information to make a better decision without making the decision for them.

And sometimes the most useful thing we can do is remain nearby while another person discovers a boundary we couldn't have identified for them.

That doesn't require indifference.

If the likely consequence is catastrophic, intervention may be justified. Nobody needs to discover the lethality of traffic by experimentation.

The tolerable mistakes are different.

A failed project. An awkward conversation. A bad performance. Something attempted before the person was quite ready.

Those experiences can provide information that advice couldn't.

The important part comes afterward.

What actually happened?

Was the limit in the world, in the circumstances, in my present capacity, or somewhere in the interaction among them?

Can I change something and try again?

Should I?

That's a much more useful response than either shame or bravado.

Getting burned doesn't prove that I was foolish to approach the fire.

Surviving it doesn't prove that everyone else should.

It tells me that something happened at the boundary between what I attempted and what the circumstances allowed.

Now I get to decide what to do with that information.

Sometimes the answer really is wonderfully simple.

"Ouch. Hot. No touch."

Other times, thankfully, we get another try.