Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.

The saying draws a sharp line between mere events and the meaning we extract from them. “Experience” here is not passive exposure to life’s accidents but an active process of interpretation, choice, and response—how one reflects, learns, and reshapes conduct after what occurs. The implication is ethical and psychological: two people can undergo the same hardship or good fortune yet end up with different “experience” because they process it differently. The quote also resists fatalism, suggesting agency in the face of circumstance and emphasizing growth as something made, not received.