People say that variety is the spice of life, and I agree that it is imperative to experience new things. I’ve always been excited about travelling to different places and trying new things. While I suspect that not everyone is like me, I’d encourage everyone to push themselves harder to try out new things.
If you are hesitant about trying new things or just looking for some encouragement, let me share with you 11 reasons you should open yourself up to experiencing new things.
Page Contents
1) You Will Discover What You Love and What You Hate
Often we accept what we already know and like as the only options out there, but that is rarely the case. Instead, there are tons of possible things that we might enjoy or be good at that we don’t even realize exist. I’ve mentioned this in the past, but when I was a kid, I wanted to be a fireman, but by the time I was old enough to start looking for a job, I knew that being a fireman wasn’t for me.
The more things we are willing to try out, the more chances we have to discover what we like, enjoy and are skillful at doing.
I didn’t find pleasure in reading until I was at university. Before that time, I didn’t see how people could enjoy reading for fun, and it was just a sort of chance that an exciting book landed in my hands, and I was willing to read it. But that first book turned into a lifelong habit that I haven’t considered a possibility before.
The great thing about being open to experiencing new things is that you get lots of chances to discover unknown stuff you may like or dislike.
But as you try out those different things, you are kind of going through a checklist of options and eliminating the bad ones and prioritizing the good ones.
2) You Will Expose Yourself to Tons of New Ideas
Experiencing new things is essential because it exposes you to new ideas that you haven’t heard before. When I decided to take a trip to India, I had no idea what to expect or what I would see when I got there.
I read many websites discussing travel in India, so I wouldn’t be completely oblivious of what to expect. But all my reading didn’t prepare me for what I saw.
When we do something we haven’t done before, those experiences come with many other things, like people and explanations. Travelling to India showed me a completely different way of life; it also showed me that I needed to be careful and observant and try to avoid scams. While these things might be points to keep in mind, their value became evident to me until I went on my travels.
Not all ideas are good, but as long as we’ve been exposed to them, then we have been allowed to think about them and judge them.
Put another way, you might say that homelessness isn’t good. But when you travel to a country where almost everyone has a lower standard of living, then you can comprehend your whole perspective on life changes. I’m not saying we shouldn’t care, instead that seeing something in real life can instantly shift your perspective.
Having new experiences exposes us to different ways of thinking about the things we see every day.
3) You Will Gain Greater Perspective On Life
As I mentioned before, my trip to India was eye-opening. One of my most vivid memories is being in a car and driving past a dirty river with garbage all around it. At the same time, a lady was leaning over cleaning clothes in that water. From the perspective of a Canadian, this is incomprehensible. Some of us may have camped in the past, but we’d never have to deal with piles of garbage like that.
While it might seem like I am being hard on India, it gave me a massive appreciation for everything I’ve taken for granted. It is often easy to look at the people around us and compare how they are doing to us, but we forget about all the people around the world who are in much more complicated situations.
My friend might have a nicer car, but neither of us has ever had to think about washing our clothes in a river.
The more we experience new things, the greater perspective we gain on the world around us.
The more experiences we have, the more we realize how extraordinary or limited our own experiences have been.
4) You Will Have More Things To Talk About
Experiencing new things is also great because it gives us so much more topics to talk about. Most people have the same experiences day in and day out, so they can only talk about what they know. In many ways, this can be limiting and boring.
I have a friend, and we were talking about a two-week vacation that I took over the summer; he told me that the last time he took two weeks off was over ten years ago. As we talked about it, he said that it wasn’t that he couldn’t take a vacation; instead, he didn’t want to take one.
If I were to talk to him about travel or vacations, he wouldn’t have much to relate to. But luckily, he is an avid reader and is curious about new ideas, so we always have stuff to talk about in that regard.
What matters is how open-minded we are, reflects how many new things we get exposed to. So while my friend isn’t open to travel, he is open to ideas, so there is a sort of balance where he tries out new things, though they are ideas rather than experiences.
It is important to experience new things because it gives us more to talk about. Put another way, the more experiences we have, the more knowledge we can share with other people.
5) You Will Gain Confidence and Get Over Our Fears
Often we are afraid of things for an unreasonable reason, or rather, we fear outcomes or consequences because they are unknown. But the thing about experiencing new things is that we learn to get past our fear, and we also realize that there isn’t always something to fear.
Most of our fears come from the unknown; we don’t know what will happen when we meet those people or don’t know what will happen when we travel to a new country. So much of our fear is fear of something we make up in our heads, rather than a legitimate fear about something real.
Luckily, the more we try out new things, the more we discover that we have nothing to fear.
At the same time, when we realize that we have nothing to fear, we also gain confidence in our abilities to overcome other fears in our lives. It is a self-fulfilling loop; unjustified fears get stomped out by being challenged, giving us the confidence to challenge other unreasonable worries.
It is great to experience new things because it helps us get over our fears and gives us the confidence to challenge other anxieties in our lives.
6) You Will Get A Break From The Routines of Your Life
So much of our lives are routines and repeats of the day before. It makes sense because we get comfortable with our way of life and stick to it. At the same time, it is often hard to break out of our routines and try something new because we have responsibilities and other reasons to keep up our habits.
Getting out of your routine and trying something new is a great way to change things up and allow yourself to explore the world around you. Experiencing new things comes out of a willingness to step outside your comfort zone and step into something new and unknown.
Life isn’t supposed to be boring, but if it is, then you probably need to change things up and add some excitement to your life.
That might not be easy at first if you aren’t used to it, but with practice, it gets easier and might, in time, turn into a new routine itself. Imagine what your life would be like if you made a habit of trying new things every day?
Getting out into the world and experiencing new things is a great way to break out of your routines and add new practices to your life.
7) You Will Get a Chance to Meet New People
I’ve always been an introverted sort of person, so it has been hard at times to push myself to get out in the world and meet new people. At one point, I stumbled across a meetup group in my city, and I decided to check it out. I ended up getting to know some people and joined the team as a technology person.
I met many different people through that group, but they were all connected through an interest in entrepreneurship. And there was no way I could have learnt all that I did from them on my own, by myself.
Experiencing new things often requires going to places you don’t usually go and meeting people you don’t usually meet.
The funny thing is that by having new experiences, you by necessity meet new people. Hearing about things from someone else’s viewpoint is a great way to gain perspective, which we talked about the importance of earlier.
Get out into the world and try new things; not only will you discover a new world, but it is also a great way to meet new people.
8) You Will Gain a Better Understand of What You Want Out of Life
This is related to the earlier point about discovering what we like and don’t like, but it goes deeper because it asks us to understand ourselves. While I’ve always been curious about learning new ideas, I’ve also been curious about self-discovery and have gained a greater understanding of myself.
I have spent some time travelling and living in other places, and I always have fond memories of travel times. But there is also something magical about travel; you get to see yourself in a different context.
This means you gain a better understanding of yourself and who you are outside of your typical context.
When I moved to Korea for a year to teach English, I never could have imagined all the things I would get up to, both good and bad. But after it was all done, I had become a different person who had a better understanding of himself. But even when I think back to those times now, I can see an evolution in myself.
Regardless, these sorts of experiences give us a chance to figure out what we want and where we need to go.
Sometimes, it isn’t easy to grasp what we want out of life, but stepping out of our context and experiencing new things gives us a unique perspective to work with.
9) You Will Learn to Appreciate Other People and Their Experience
When we spend a lot of time with ourselves, we get a more rigid perspective about how things are in the world. If you think about the lockdowns, we probably all experienced some degree of this. On the other hand, the more you get out and do things, the less firm your perspective becomes.
In a way, this is mostly about seeing that other people exist and they exist in a different world from us.
The more we experience new things, the more our sense of certainty gets worn down, and we start to wonder what we are so sure about? But it doesn’t have to be this way; by trying new things and going out into the world, you get to see and appreciate the other possibilities that exist.
There are so many possibilities, but the only way to appreciate that is to go out into the world and try new things.
But remember, other people are also doing the same things as you, or at least they might be trying to, so you can gain from that perspective as well, in that there are other ways.
Trying new things lets you go out into the world and experience life with other people; this activity enables you to appreciate all that people offer.
10) You Will Have The Advantage of Lots of Experiences
I used to get along well with a coworker; we used to grab a coffee every day and talk about all sorts of things. One thing that I noticed, though, was that I had done so many more things than he had. I don’t mean that as a brag, but rather that I have an abnormally broad range of experiences.
What I mean, though, is that the more you see and experience, the better you are prepared for surprises. If you’ve gotten lost on a busy street, you might learn to keep track of where you are while you are walking. It is something you would know or get better at with practice, like anything else.
The more experiences we have, the better prepared we are for future adventures.
When I talk to people about my ideas, they often get confused as regular people don’t think about those sorts of things. And while it has been awkward at times for small talk, it has helped me find some exceptional friends with who I can have great conversations.
The exciting thing is that these people are all different, as we don’t share any mutual friends. But that also enables me to have a broad range of friends with different interests.
Having lots of experience helps us connect with people in profound but different ways; it also helps guide us through new experiences that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
11) You Will Create a New You
Ultimately, every experience we have creates a new possibility, and whether we go down that path or not, it at least becomes an option. While not all options are worth taking, some you will decide are worth the effort. The thing is that effort leads to new potentials, which leads to new concepts of ourselves.
As I mentioned earlier, living in different places gives you a chance to leave the old you behind, try out someone else and come back a new person. There are parts of you that you can not change, but other factors are just waiting for the chance to be discovered.
The more new habits we build, the more of a new person we become.
All of this comes down to a choice, do you want to stay the same? If so, then keep doing the same things, but if you want to be someone else, then you’ve got to step out of your typical and try something different.
Often we might not notice that we are changing, instead, it is gradual, or so it seems, but when we open a new door, metaphorically speaking at least, we get to see ourselves anew and might notice a whole bunch of things at once.
The best way to create a new you is to get out in the world and try new things. By the act of trying something out, you become someone else, and that sets you free to be whoever you want in the future.
Once you’ve gotten used to experiencing new things as a part of your life, your next step is to start thinking for yourself. Once you’ve done that, you need to make sure that you don’t work too hard. From there you can discover the importance of life experience.
Thanks for reading all of this.