Knowledge and experience of the world are not the same.
Take the phone out of your pocket, open it and find knowledge of anywhere or anything in the world within seconds.
You can go to the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or the Barrier Reef or the middle of Scunthorpe; you can have knowledge of all of these things, but that will pale into insignificance in relation to the experience of those things.
The night after the Aesthetic Days International Aesthetic Days conference at the weekend. Actually, the night of the finish of the aesthetic days conference at the weekend, I went for dinner with three friends. With us was Tom Reason, a friend and colleague at the Clinic that runs marketing and education. Together with him were Colin Burns, someone who grew up in my hometown, went to the same schools as me, worked in the same place, and went to the same dental school. We've known each other for a long time, we've shared many experiences, and also, with Colin was his wife, Gael.
What we did that night was share our experience of what had happened over the past few days.
I had had a particularly good day on Saturday for several reasons. Firstly, the talk that I was worried about on the big stage went well. Secondly, I went running (proper running), only for a very short while, but I felt more like a runner than I'd been in 10 years, and so we were able to go out and share the good things that happened to us.
Compare experiences, not the knowledge of what had happened, but the experience of what happened, and we shared it with each other.
It was a beautiful night, in fact, simple, but one that I will always remember, because what we need is contact.
We need to share our experiences of things; we can't do that digitally. It's not possible. We can get all the knowledge we ever want, but that is nothing compared to a shared experience.
Blog Post Number - 4330