Learn From Your Failures Just as You Do from Your Successes

"One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen, can change the world." ― Malala Yousafzai

We never stop learning, we always learn in one way or in another, but we continue to learn. The education that we receive in our schooling is not only the learning we have. Our actual learning will start once we come out of the school or college and start working in the real world.

We learn at our work place, we learn from our collogues or from our friends. We learn from our enemies as well. We learn from our failures and from our experiences.

Most of the time, we learn from our experiences and from the people around us. But if someone want to improve his learning, then he have to learn from other's experiences as well.

How you can learn from other’s experience?

The answer lies in the reading of good books  and it is also important to learn how to read abook?

Read good books from great authors and learn from there experiences. By developing this small habit, will help you to take right decisions and help you to grow in your life.

By reading and writing, we learn from our experiences as well as from other’s experiences.

Maria konnikova, in the book Mastermind how to think like sherlock holmes writes that we never stop learning, we always learn. Let’s read what she write-

"In observing Watson’s fallacies in this particular instance, Holmes learns ever more about the pitfalls of the thought process, those moments when it is easy to go astray—and precisely in which direction the false path usually lies. From this encounter, he will take away the power of stereotype activation and the overwhelming influence an improper initial frame can have on the inferences that follow, as well as the error that is introduced when one fails to consider every observation and focuses instead on the most salient, recent, or otherwise accessible ones. Not that he doesn’t know both of these things already, but each time serves as a reminder, a reinforcement, a new manifestation in a different context that ensures that his knowledge never goes stale.”

Holmes always keep a keen eye on all the events, on how the other person behave and act, on the things around him and he observe very closely and learn from his observation. Maria Continues-

“Education is all well and good, but it needs to be taken from the level of theory to that of practice, over and over and over—lest it begin to gather dust and let out that stale, rank smell of the attic whose door has remained unopened for years."

Maria suggests that whatever we read or learn, we should bring the learning to the practice. Then only we can learn. While practicing we do mistakes and by mistakes, we open the new door for more learning and this is how the knowledge will expand.

“Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.” ― Ann Voskamp

Mahatma Ghandi suggests, how to live and learn:

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

Read the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, My experiments with truth, and you come to know that Mahatma Gandhi is a great learner from his experience as well as from other’s experience. He never stops learning.

There is another way to learn more and that is teaching to other person, whatever you learned. 

Charlie Munger sugegsts:

“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”  Charlie Munger

By teaching, you come to know, what you don’t know and knowing what you don’t know is the real wisdom and factual knowledge.

If you don’t believe, just start teaching a simple thing to a toddler that you just learn. You come to know that there are many questions that are still unanswered.

In Mr. Feynman words, you just know the name of the thing, not the thing. You must know difference between knowing the name of something and understanding the thing.

"See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way."

Once you start thinking in the direction of understanding something, your knowledge will expand exponentially and your learning will not have any limits.

Learn From Your Failures Just as You Do from Your Successes. Its true that we learn from our failures but we must learn from our successes as well. Once you get failed or get succeed, just analyse the events and try to figure out the causes of the failure or success and learn from the events. 

Think if the events not go in the way, the way it happens. What are the consequences? Think like a devil advocate. 

For any work, just do a pre mortem.

I will end the discussion with the quote by Einstein:

 Keep reading, keep learning

-Mahesh