Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are?

Do You Think We’re Shaped by Our Experience or by Who We Are?
I have asked myself this question more times than I can count, usually late at night, after a long day of ward rounds, or after sitting with a child at the orphanage who has already survived more than some adults ever will. Are we the sum of what has happened to us? Or do we walk into every experience already carrying the outline of who we were always going to become?
I don’t think I have a tidy answer. But I have a story, or rather several, that keep circling back to me whenever I sit with the question.
The Boy I Was Before Anything Happened
Before I ever stepped into a hospital ward, before King David Properties was a name on a business plan, before the Foundation had a single student enrolled, there was a boy who simply liked to notice people. I liked watching how a teacher’s tone changed when a struggling student finally understood something. I liked sitting quietly at the edge of adult conversations, absorbing more than I let on. Nobody taught me to care this way. It feels like it was already there, waiting for life to give it a shape to pour into.
That’s the case for who we are. Some part of me showed up to this world already tuned a certain way.
And Then Life Started Writing on the Page
But then experience came, and it did not just decorate that boy. It carved him.
Medical school did not just teach me anatomy; it taught me what it feels like to hold a patient’s fear in your hands and not flinch. Losing people I loved taught me that comfort is sometimes just presence, not words. Building the Foundation out of nothing but conviction and stubbornness taught me that vision without discipline is just a nice feeling. Every outreach, every “Catch Them Young” session, every business plan I have rewritten at 1 a.m. has left a mark on me that was not there before.
If you had shown me to myself five years ago, I would not have recognized the version of me who can sit in a boardroom discussing property brokerage in the morning and then sit on the floor of an orphanage in the afternoon without feeling like two different people. Experience did that. It stretched me into someone wider than I started out as.
Maybe the Question Itself Is the Trap
Here’s what I have come to believe, tentatively, the way I believe most things worth believing: nature gives us a seed, and experience decides what kind of tree grows. But the seed still matters. A mango seed planted in poor soil will struggle, but it will not become a coconut tree no matter how hard the soil tries.
I was born with a certain sensitivity to other people’s pain. Life did not create that; it just kept giving me reasons to use it. Medicine did not make me compassionate. It gave my compassion a place to work.
I think this is where faith enters my own understanding of it. I believe we are each formed with intention before we are formed by circumstance. Scripture tells us we were known before we were shaped in the womb. That tells me the “who we are” comes first, as a kind of quiet inheritance. But I also believe God uses experience, even painful experience, as the very instrument through which He reveals that inheritance to us. We do not discover our purpose in a vacuum. We discover it in hospital corridors, in failed business ventures, in orphanages, in the quiet aftermath of grief.
What I Would Say to Someone Asking This Question
If you are wrestling with this question yourself, especially if you are young and still deciding who you want to become, here is what I would offer you: stop trying to separate the two. Instead, ask yourself what has consistently stirred something in you, long before you had the language or the opportunity to act on it. That stirring is likely your nature speaking.
Then look at what life has since done to sharpen, redirect, or deepen that stirring. That is your experience, doing its quiet work.
You are not one or the other. You are a conversation between the two, still being written.
I know I am. Every patient I meet, every student the Foundation reaches, every property deal I close, every awkward joke I post to a small YouTube audience that is slowly growing, I am both the boy who was always going to care this much, and the man that life keeps teaching how to carry that caring well.
Maybe that is the most honest answer any of us can give.