My grandmother was born in 1913 and grew up on a farm during the Depression. They didn’t have much — but they had enough. Enough food, enough work, enough responsibility to understand that effort mattered and consequences were real.

She knew hard work early. Farm work wasn’t optional, and nothing came easily. She earned a high school diploma at a time when many didn’t. She later became a homebody, raising two children, managing a household, and making do without excess.

She never owned a business. She wasn’t wealthy in any financial sense. But she had something more durable: judgment shaped by experience.  She was a quiet fountain of wisdom. She didn’t use management jargon or leadership theory, but she understood human nature better than most people I’ve met.

One thing she used to say stayed with me:
“The best lesson is a bought lesson.”

At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate what she meant. Over the years, I came to understand it this way: some lessons don’t truly change behavior until they cost you something — money, time, trust, or opportunity.

Advice can be ignored.
Observation can be dismissed.
But experience that carries a price tends to stick.

I think that’s why experience changes judgment. It isn’t that experienced people know more — it’s that they’ve already paid for certain lessons, and they’re not eager to pay for them twice.

That perspective has shaped how I think about leadership, risk, and decision-making. Not with cynicism — but with respect for consequences.

Some lessons are free.
The important ones rarely are.

Experience doesn’t just teach — it prices the lesson.