Only Fools Learn by Their Mistakes!

A wise old man once told my much younger self, “Only fools learn by their mistakes, clever people learn by others’ mistakes”. 

I certainly subscribe to the idea that you can learn by making mistakes. After all, this is how children learn so effectively, they try things out and they see what works. This is also how adults become such ineffective learners because they stop making mistakes. Over the years we learn that making mistakes is bad and to be avoided at all costs. This starts at high school and continues through one’s working career. 

I remember one of my class mates at school reading a fairly hard book we were studying for English Literature ‘O’ Level, and he pronounced a word incorrectly. Although the teacher didn’t make a big deal of it, the rest of the class were not so forgiving and embarassed him by laughing. He certainly learnt to pronounce the word correctly after that but he wasn’t so keen on reading in class. This episode obviously negatively impacted his learning going forward. 

Although I hear business gurus espousing the virtues of providing a “safe” workplace in which employees are allowed to make mistakes, I don’t see it. In fact I see the opposite. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Would a company really be successfully if its employees were makings so many mistakes? It feels doubtful. I also doubt the customers would enjoy doing business with such a company. Customer: "This food tastes disgusting", waiter: "sorry about that, the chef is still learning".

So learning by making mistakes might not be the best way for promotion up the corporate ladder. But even if we were encouraged to make mistakes at work, could we really make enough of them to fully learn all the lessons? Furthermore, making mistakes doesn’t feel good, in fact it feels terrible!

So back to my quote at the start of this piece, don’t learn by making mistakes, let others make the mistakes and learn from them. That advice is now starting to sound good but if your colleagues are risk adverse and not making the mistakes either, whose mistakes are you going to learn from?

Simple, read books!

CEOs and top entrepreneurs are avid readers. Have you ever wondered why? It’s because they are learning from all the mistakes other people have made. The more books they read, they more they are learning. 

For example “What I learned losing a million dollars” by Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan is full of lessons. Better for Jim Paul to lose a million dollars then for you. Or how about “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”, an excellent autobiographical account by Scott Adams. Here he shows how to turn failure into success, and Scott is a very successful person. “Billion-Dollar Lessons” by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui has many accounts about how businesses went from success to bankrupt in one easy step, who wouldn’t want to avoid that! However businesses keep repeating the same mistakes, read this book and learn the lessons.

Now I really understand that excellent piece of advice given to me as a boy, given to me by my father. Shame I didn’t heed it earlier. Another mistake made and another lesson learned.