Learn From Your Mistakes

April 18th, 2008 | by Chris |

One of the things that we taught through the “mainstream” educational system from our early years is to avoid mistakes at all costs. At its softer form teachers gives us bad graves, but the most harsh form is when the whole class laughs with someone and ridicules him for his ignorance. The rest of the story is known, some drop out while the rest even if they never being on the receiving end of such a treatment they learn their lesson very well. Avoid mistakes at all costs, better safe than sorry, always try to be right.

The consequence is a society where being right is the most important thing, just look around you and on TV. Everybody is trying to defend what he believes, his opinions, himself. No inquiry, no search for the truth, no willingness to investigate other ways. Being wrong or not knowing is almost a sin, it can really hurt anyones feelings.

Cat
Photo by vincent.chen

But in the business world such attitude never leads to success. A business is like a living organism that interacts with the environment, gets feedback, and adapts in order to survive.

That’s how living things learn, from the feedback they get from the environment. And that’s how the human brain learns besides from written or spoken words and observation. Every time we try something and we fail we get the necessary feedback to improve the way we do it until we succeed, like when we learn to ride a bike.

Unfortunately, on the more important things we tend to put aside such a behavior and disregard all the info we get from the environment. We keep doing the same things, failure upon failure, without changing anything, not even the smallest bit of it. We keep repeating behaviors that won’t lead us anywhere, trying to defend what we already do and know by denying or ignoring all the data that show us we do something wrong and hence we don’t get the desired results.

But such a behavior for an entrepreneur is suicidal. It doesn’t build successful businesses and create wealth. It’s a waste of time and resources and sometimes of ones whole life spent unproductively without getting what he wants. Persistence and patience are virtues but stubbornness is a curse that someone can pay dearly for it.

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