by Shane Parrish, Farnam Street
âForgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition⊠Why not celebrate stupidities!â â Charlie Munger
âIf anyone can refute me â show me Iâm making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective â Iâll gladly change. Itâs the truth Iâm after and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignoranceâ â Marcus Aurelius in Meditations
Sometimes we lose our way.
We make mistakes. We focus on the wrong things. We pursue goals at all costs. We teeter on ethical and moral cliffs. We get too far down a slippery slope. We steal. We cheat. We lie. We deceive others. We deceive ourselves. We donât open ourselves up to our friends. We see crime or fraud and donât speak out.
You can be a good person and still exercise poor judgment.
In these moments weâre not the friend others deserve, the partner others choose, the child our parents raised, the exemplar we wish to be, nor the person weâre capable of being.
It can happen to the best of us. Weâre human. We all make mistakes.
Just because weâve lost our way doesnât mean that we are lost forever. In the end, itâs not the failures that define us so much as how we respond.
Many of us get steered off course at some point in our lives, but what really counts is the choices that follow those mistakes. A teen who gets in trouble with the law, for example, can accept responsibility for his actions, change his behaviour, and go on to lead the nation, or he can see only failure and tumble into a vicious cycle of committing ever-larger crimes.
Itâs not that you stumble, itâs that you get back up. Itâs not that you did something wrong but that you realize whatâs happening and change. Itâs not that you messed up as a friend or lover, itâs that you see ways you can be better. Having the wrong priorities is bad enough, but realizing that and refusing to change is worse. Itâs not that you never took the time to smell the roses and admire the sunset, itâs that once you realize this you take the time to notice.
Mistakes are bad, no doubt, but not learning from them is worse. The key to learning from mistakes is to admit them without excuses or defensiveness, rub your nose in them a little, and make the changes you need to make to grow going forward. If you canât admit your mistakes, you wonât grow.
Copyright © Farnam Street
