Learn From Your Mistakes

Arguably one of the greatest powers that a human being has is the ability to Learn From Your Mistakes. The entire progress of our species is founded on the accumulation of learning. Learning how to do thing in new ways. Failing, making mistakes, learning from them, and evolving culturally as a species over time as a result.

Understanding our mistakes gives us the building blocks for future success. Every mistake that we have ever made tells us something important about ourselves. About our strengths and weaknesses, flaws, psychology, and past limitations. Where we are in our skills, and what we have to work on.

To avoid failure in general, and to hide from the mistakes that we have made — and continue to make — robs us of our greatest opportunity to grow.

Don’t Be Afraid Of Your Past Failures

Do not fear what has happened in the past. In all fairness, this is easier said than done. Much of what is buried in our psyche from painful (embarrassing, shameful, harrowing) experiences is by its very nature difficult to confront.

Yet the difficulty in that reconciliation is precisely where the greatest potential for growth resides. These experiences probably hold some of the most profound truths, if we can find the strength within ourselves to pull these memories from the vault, and carefully unpack them so as to not cut ourselves with their sharp edges, in order to learn.

When you look into the past and realize that if you just kept pushing forwards and you would have succeeded, because the finish line was just around the corner, this g

Learning From Your Mistakes Gives Them Value

When you learn from your mistakes, they become among our most precious resources, and most powerful impetus for evolution. Learning from them literally transforms them into knowledge, and wisdom, which can then be used to solve problems that we presently face, because more than likely, we are continuing to make those same mistakes in new ways, if we fail to understand them.

They become valuable, because they are literal springs of wisdom. We can then begin to be curious about and enjoy making mistakes, because we know that we are learning something new. Every mistakes becomes (and already is) an opportunity for further evolution.

Fixate On The Lesson

Once you have extracted knowledge and wisdom from your failures, fixate on the lesson. A problem that seems to afflict many, many people is an inability to stay with something. Not goals, habits, pursuits, or practices — those too, of course — but the ideas themselves.

How many great quotes, insights, and ideas to (probably) most of us come across every day by scrolling through some social media platform or another. Yet how many of those ideas do we actually capture, ponder, apply, and integrate into our lives? If you are anything like me, a laughably small percentage.

To be fair, there is such an inundation of information nowadays, that in many ways, it is like trying to grab something floating down the river, when there is no shortage of shiny objects that entice us as they float on by. Yet if we never choose anything to extract, handle, and learn deeply, then we will never go anywhere.

This is the challenge of the modern age — choosing one from the multitude, and staying with that choice. At least for a time. Yet in some ways, to learn from your mistakes is the best way, because these are real. These are things that have happened to us, our experiences, real failures in real-time. Therefore we know they hold answers. They are not just shiny ideas, desires, or wishful thinking that sounds good.

Our mistakes are direct feedback from life. They tell us precisely where we can improve. So many people are searching the world for answers about how to grow, improve themselves, fix their lives — yet this knowledge lives in our failures. Our failures are how and where we broke something, wherein also resides the knowledge of how to fix it, and heal.