"Mistakes are the best teachers.
One does not learn from success.
It is desirable to learn vicariously
from other people's failures,
but it gets much more firmly seared in
when they are your own."
-- Mohnish Pabrai
[Classic post from 10-19-14]
Although I agree that mistakes are great teachers and that doing and missing the mark can have huge advantages to lead toward the ultimate objective. I also agree that it is great to learn from others and their mistakes so that we might avoid the necessity to make our own, and that probably it is our own mistakes that give us the most power of learning.
Yet, there is one statement in this quote that I completely disagree with. Mr. Pabrai says that "one does not learn from success." Indeed, I think we learn as much from success or perhaps even more than from any mistakes. All you have to do is watch children when they are very young and one can see how much children learn from success.
From a willingness to do, there is the potential for success or failure. Although those words can be confusing, each of them indicates an outcome. It is not necessarily the final outcome because each outcome indicates some kind of movement along a path. You've heard the old phrase that two wrongs don't make a right, so two failures don't make success either. Potentially one can make mistake after mistake and never succeed I suppose, yet they can make success after success and grow stronger, wiser, and more fluent in success.
I think it is far more important to praise what is being done well or right, and so success is as much a learning tool as a failure in any endeavor.
The easier way to see this is that they are just actions and results, neither good nor bad, they just are. What we do with those results is the key, and we will typically grow much faster and more surely by stringing successes together.
Little Successes Lead To Larger Ones. Go Forth and Play With Success.
Spread Some Joy Today--by giving yourself the gift of allowing yourself to enjoy your day fully.
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