If you don’t learn from the first time you do something incorrectly, you’ll continue to do it the same way in the future. But that mentality can be improved. Why learn solely from your mistakes when you can learn from the mistakes of others? In fact, according to a recent study by two researchers at Bristol University in England, we learn from our mistakes, but it turns out that we could learn more from others’ mistakes.
Learning from others requires a different approach than focusing inward. As a case in point, even though you may be comfortable admitting mistakes, and learning from them, others may not be. While most people enjoy touting their success, admitting their shortcomings doesn’t come easy.
People’s Mistake cannot make you scars
On personal level, people come to accept the scars on their body one way or the other. However, if they had the choice, they would have probably loved to experience what they went through without the scars i.e. if they want to experience it all over again in the first place.
This is more so when it comes to business decisions. Nobody wants to lose money and have the scars to remind them always about it. they do not want people to be reminded of it as well. learning from other people’s mistakes makes you smarter than them because they too could have learnt from the mistakes of others but did not.
There is always someone making a business/financial mistake somewhere. They may not have seen it coming or had been fully aware of it; the fact is there are just too many reasons why mistakes happen. You as an individual do not have an excuse to say I did not know when there are so many people about you making mistakes.
Take time out to search and study the failure stories. When you do this, you learn from their mistakes and prevent yourself from having scars to show. If there is anything to repeat in this section, it is that mistakes are happening every day and you do not have an excuse.
You do not suffer loss
Learning from other people’s mistakes is like assimilating their losses without experiencing it. that is the kind of loss most people will want to have but this can only happen when they learn from the mistakes of those that suffered loss due to errors on their part. Some will harp on why you should not be afraid of failure but I can say contextually that is you do not have a deep respect for failure you will end up experiencing it a lot.
If you have a deep respect for failure as an adversary, you will take time out to study those it defeated at one point on the other. This can be applied to any aspect of life. You know the strengths of an enemy or a potential opponent when you watch him or her (in this case, it) in the ring with another opponent. You know how it fights and get to discover its weakness by way of business evaluations. Learning from other people’s mistakes is a great way of studying failure and knowing how to deal with it when it stares at you in the ring.
Suffering loss is one of the most probable indicators of mistakes. It shows that someone has most probably made a mistake somewhere. Studying the losses of others might tell you what to do to prevent that loss from repeating itself with you.
You have only good experiences
There are good experiences and bad experiences. The person that teaches from a bad experience is probably admitting to have made a mistake sometime in the past, which may have been by omission or commission. It will be hard to find a person who will willingly say they are looking forward to having a bad experience.
You may find someone who dealt with a bad experience by learning to embrace it, but all of this only points out to the predisposition of people towards having a good experience. You have good experiences when you learn from people’s mistakes. So start learning from other people’s mistakes.
