Why We Learn More From Our Failures Than Our Successes

Most people would imagine that their life would be perfect if they went from success to success – from one peak to another, without any valleys. However, the irony is that you would find this boring, as you would learn very little as you grew older.

The fact is, we don’t learn much from our successes. We take them for granted and assume they are the well-deserved outcome of our skills, hard work, and expertise. Even though the reality is that they occur often because we were lucky, and found ourselves in the right place, at the right time!).

Failures are a completely different animal! They bother us, which is why they remain stuck in our heads. We replay them repeatedly because they hurt our ego, and we keep on thinking about what we can do differently the next time, to prevent them from recurring. Often this is a futile exercise, and we find ourselves fighting the last war, instead of moving forward.

We suffer from self-attribution bias, where we attribute good outcomes to skill and bad outcomes to luck. This prevents us from recognising mistakes as just mistakes, which prevents us from learning from our mistakes.

Errors are inevitable, and we need to develop a system, so we can learn from them.

Embrace Your Mistakes, Grow In Life

It’s important to be disciplined. And it’s helpful to think of life as a series of experiments, both big (should I switch jobs?) and small (should I stop eating meat?) Write down your hypothesis, make a list of reasons why you may fail and then track your metrics proactively.

It’s important to record leading indicators, so you are on top of the problem, and can change track as needed. If you approach life in this fashion, I can promise you that you will become wiser over time.

It’s a cliche to say that we learn by our mistakes but the truth is that you can’t learn without making mistakes. These could be accidental, or deliberate, but you can learn from all of them – both the ones you make and the ones you observe others making.

In fact, you can measure your ability to learn new things by the number of mistakes you allow yourself to make.

Sometimes the lessons can be expensive, and this is when the cutting edge can also become the bleeding edge. You need to think of ways which allow you to learn quickly, cheaply, and safely.

[This post by Dr. Aniruddha Malpani originally appeared on LinkedIn and has been reproduced with permission.]

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.