This is something I think about so often, I’m shocked I’ve never written about it before.
While you constantly hear people talk about failures as opportunities and mistakes as opportunities to learn, you never hear anybody talk about the dangers of doing that.
What if the lessons you learn are actually detrimental to your progress?
If I were to ever put this in a book, I would cite plenty of studies to show that people learn more indelible lessons from very bad experiences than they do from good ones.
If you burn your hand on the stove as a kid, you might be afraid of the stove forever and never really use one.
But if you cook a really great stir-fry, you’re never going to swear off other forms of cooking and only use that.
And because of that, I honestly think better advice would be, “DON’T learn anything from your failures.” Even just saying that sounds so completely contradictory to everything I’ve ever been told that it sounds absurd. But seriously, I think it’s true.
Now, as a quick aside, I want to make it clear that what I’m referencing here is times when you’ve tried at task or job and been unsuccessful at it. I’m not really talking about moral or ethical failures which should almost universally be learned from. I am absolutely not suggesting that you should keep being a bad person because it might pay off one day. Okay, we can move on!
I think that rather than refining their strategy and constantly improving, most people “learn from their mistakes” and accumulate so many aversions and fears over the course of their life that they eventually reach a point where they don’t take any risks, never learn anything new, and just stay in their comfort zone.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense. In caveman days, you would have been in constant mortal peril, and it was more important for you to learn about all the dangers and avoid them than it was for you to innovate or master a valuable skill.
An inventor trying to perfect new weapons would have been more likely to get killed by an animal when it failed than actually succeed at creating something new.
I recently had an interaction with an older potential client that I found baffling. We were in the proposal stage of quite a small project. In that proposal, I described our billing schedule which was half of the fee up-front, and half when the project goes live. It is so ubiquitous within my industry that clients often just assume that’s what it will be, and are correct.
He balked at the notion and almost seemed offended. He told me that with that schedule, there’s no way to hold me accountable to doing a good job, and that he’d been burned in the past. He told me he wasn’t interested in working with me.
At first I just had to wonder what he had been through to develop that degree of cynicism. I’ll never know for sure, but it’s obvious that he learned some painful lessons, and I would argue that those lessons are extremely detrimental to his success.
Because if that’s his non-starter, how is he ever going to get this project done? That question is, of course, rhetorical: he won’t. His website has clearly been untouched for probably 15+ years, and at this point it’s never going to happen. He’s not going to find an agency that will perfectly meet all of his requirements without spooking him.
He’s just learned too many painful lessons and is now too afraid to take any kind of risk, even when that risk is minimal.
Now, I’m being partly facetious when I say that you shouldn’t learn anything from your mistakes or failures. If you really, truly mess up and especially when it is definitely your fault, you should definitely learn and not do that again in the future.
And even in other situations, you should of course try to learn lessons, but you have to be careful what those lessons are.
And more importantly: you need to learn to weight those lessons appropriately.
We tend to remember painful experiences much more vividly, and our bias towards avoiding similar situations is disproportionate to the actual risk. And that bias only increases as we grow older.
So I think it’s important to just see things for what they are. Sometimes bad things happen, and it’s not our fault. Sometimes it is our fault.
Sometimes there may be nothing to be learned. But other times it might just be a matter of knowing the risks and learning to watch out for them without becoming unreasonable.
We’ve all traveled with the neurotic family member who has tunnel vision for one specific problem and constantly talks about it despite it not being a big deal.
People do it with their careers, too, and even their lives. Your focus on what could go wrong should be commensurate with the true risk.
It can be extremely difficult to take a step back and determine whether you are letting the fear of something hold you back, but it’s absolutely worth the effort.
“Most men either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.”
– Criss Jami