Internal experience and external experience are common patterns for family business to train successors. This paper focuses on the differences in the effects of these two different patterns on firm performance after successors have exerted significant influence on the firm. Based on the learning theory, this paper proposes a partially adjusted mediation effect model, and uses the 2016 survey data of 183 family firms in Zhejiang province to empirically test the hypothesis models. The results of data analysis show that the influence of the successors training patterns on the succession performance of firms is completely mediated by the successors' recognition, and this is a typical indirect mediating effect. Specifically, the internal experience pattern plays a positive role in the successors' recognition and can promote the firm performance. While the external experience pattern has a negative effect, which will have a negative impact on firm performance. However, the tutor can effectively alleviate or even reverse the negative impact of the external experience pattern. This study uses the learning theory for the first time to integrate the research on the succession process and results of family business successors, and finds that the successor's recognition is the intermediate mechanism between the successor training patterns and firm performance, which will help to improve the systematic understanding of the training process of family business successors.