And we were not told to study the right things we did, our achievements and successes. To do that would have been immodest, we were told.
I've asked lots of people how they go about learning from their mistakes. They all say they do. But they seem to have difficulty explaining how they go about it, and what benefits they get from doing it.
Do You Ever Make Mistakes?
Of course you make mistakes. All of us make mistakes. All of us wish we made fewer mistakes. And it seems as though we all vow never to make the same mistake a second time.
But let me give you a warning right now. The more time you give to studying your mistakes, the more likely you are to increase the number of mistakes you make.
I won't say it's impossible to learn from your mistakes. But it comes very close to that. One obvious reason is that you are not really willing to study your mistakes; they are painful to think about, and perhaps embarrassing. The more you think about them, the more pain you inflict upon yourself. So it is reasonable that you stop thinking about them before you can study them thoroughly.
I'll say it again. People don't learn from their mistakes. When you admit your mistakes, as we are generally taught to do, you are following an ancient and charming practice which was invented to prove modesty and willingness to learn. Over the centuries, this quaint custom has been distorted, twisted to almost the reverse in meaning: "you can learn from your mistakes" instead of the old idea- "admit your mistakes and thereby indicate your willingness to learn."
The idea that you can learn from your mistakes is one of the biggest causes of failure, and certainly a stumbling block in the way of your increased success.
Everyone says you should profit from your mistakes. I have said it too. But if you do learn or profit from your mistakes, you should want to make more mistakes in order to profit more.
That sounds like nonsense, the idea that the more mistakes you make, the more you can profit. But it certainly follows from the idea that you can learn or profit from your mistakes.
Frankly, I am trying to shock you into realizing that something you have taken almost for granted just doesn't make sense at all.
If you are going to speed your progress, comfortably, you will need to break with some of the old practices which have been holding you back.
Every great advance by man has followed a break with tradition. Tradition and precedent must give way to principle. New principles, and old principles better understood, are the gateway to progress.
Tradition and precedent are, too often, crutches that support decayed practices.
For example, here's an outworn idea: "The burnt child fears the fire." There is some truth to it. But if a little girl who burned her fingers on a hot stove were to stay away from stoves forever, how would she learn to cook? And, again, how about those who played with fire, were burned, and then went on to found the Bronze Age, the Steel Age, and now the Nuclear Age?
Another example, this one leading to the point I wish to make: "If man were meant to fly, he would have been born with wings." Millions of people cling to that old belief, even though the 3000 mile Atlantic Ocean has shrunk to five hours of flight. The curious facts here involve the limitations of winged life as well as the accomplishments of man-made "wings."
The creatures born to fly are remarkably limited in their conquest of the air. Bees constantly overshoot their landings on blossoms. Migrating birds injure themselves by the thousands, flying into cliffs, tall buildings, trees and other obstructions. Soaring birds cannot venture into tumultuous winds. And even radar-equipped bats are vulnerable to changes of light and temperature. Envious man studied their strengths and weaknesses for centuries, gave too much, consideration to the latter, and wound up fearing their limitations.
During the last fifty years, man has taken a different scientific approach: he has paid attention to their strengths, added up their achievements alone. To these, he added some accomplishments of his own. Only then, by piling selected elements of one achievement on another, did man succeed in conquering the sky. Flight, radar and under-the-water sonic developments-these and other advances come not from brain-limited birds and fishes, but from man's observation of the uniquely effective uses they make of their "equipment."
Who's Road to Success?
I couldn't estimate the number of qualified persons who have pointed out the road to success, and it would appear from the diversity of their directions that there are as many roads as there are advisers. There are indeed, just as many kinds of successes to be reached by them; but are they the roads for you, leading to where you want to go? And how do you know you'll like it when you get there?
There is a serious danger in following these "established" roads to success. Many of them are as outmoded as the directions for following the Oregon Trail. Many of them lead to goals that no longer exist, or are overcrowded, like the quaint ocean resort of two years ago that is now a mess of fishing piers, bowling alleys and dance halls. Today lives of great men all remind us that they made their lives sublime by altering the very circumstances that made them great. In his autobiography the great physicist Robert Millikan wrote: "For it has been the lot of all the generations of mankind up to the two generations my life span has covered to leave the world at death very much the same kind of place they found it at birth. But this will not be true of those of us who came from the vintage of '68. Our ordinary life experiences bear little resemblance to those of my father, and much less to those of my grandfather."
Most of our traditional rules of success have been passed down through so many generations that they are in a rut. What was good in one century was good in the next. No longer is this true. I'm not saying that the successful men of history would be failures in today's world. I'm thinking they would take one look at our existing opportunities, compare them with the meager few they had, and really take off. I'm also thinking they would find the rules for success they had used too restricting for modern living, and would use their rugged individualism to make a fresh start. Not for them the old recipe for rabbit stew: "First you catch the rabbit-" They would head for the frozen food department, and if their chortles in Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman could be translated in general terms, they would add up to, "Boy, in this modern world how can you fail?"
