Training and experience are often mentioned in the same breath, but they aren’t the same—and they don’t carry equal weight in every situation. Both matter, but how they matter is different.

Training is the starting line. It’s where you learn the framework: the rules, the systems, the best practices. It’s clean, controlled, and designed to give you a solid grasp of what should happen. You walk out of a training session with the language, the checklists, and the steps. It gives you the “how,” and sometimes even the “why.”

Experience, on the other hand, is what happens when you step into the unpredictable. It’s the chaos, the pressure, the setbacks, and the small wins that build confidence and skill. Experience teaches you what training can’t—how to adapt when things don’t go to plan, how to read people, how to handle real stakes, and how to stay composed when the pressure is real.

You can be highly trained and still get caught off guard in the field. You can know the process cold, but panic when things go off-script. That’s where experience separates you. It gives you the instincts that only come from repetition, from solving problems when there’s no guidebook in front of you.

But experience without training has limits too. You can spend years doing something the hard way, unaware there’s a better method. You can miss out on efficiencies, safety, or strategy because nobody ever showed you the foundation.

The truth is, you need both.

Training sets the stage. Experience fills in the gaps. Training helps you avoid preventable mistakes. Experience helps you handle the unpreventable ones. Training gives you the rules. Experience teaches you when to bend them—and when not to.

In the end, it’s not a competition. It’s a combination. And the people who rise the fastest and last the longest usually have a balance of both.