As you journey through life and everyday you live, there is one among the various inevitables that you will experience - it is mistake. Of course, as long as you make attempts towards something and as long as you live, you have the propensity to make a form of mistake or the other. But this is also one of the triggers for personal growth and development. You do not only draw lessons from mistakes but it makes you better. You will agree with me that when you do something and maybe make a few errors in it, the next time you will do it, you would have gotten better at the attempt. This shows the valuable lessons that can be learnt from mistakes.
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During one of my vacation jobs when I was in school, I was given a task of what to do, which I had not done before. So I had to read a couple of things about it. However, when I gave it a first attempt, it did not work because of some mistakes I made during the implementation. I had to take a moment to analyse the process again and then took vital lessons from my first attempt. I discovered where I did not get it the first time, then I had to try again and in the second attempt, I did it excellently well. You see, no one taught me how to get it done the second time but I simply learnt the lesson from my first attempt.
It is very good to be able to learn from one's own personal mistakes, but it is far much better to learn from the experience of others. The truth is that there are some mistakes that can only be made once and that would be it, because the person might not even have the opportunity to try again. This is why it is better you observe and learn from other people's errors. If you wait until you have experienced everything first-hand before you learn anything, then you are already running at a risk. I remember what our chemistry teacher, when we were in secondary school, told us during one of our practicals with acids and bases.
He brought a Sulphuric acid (H2SO4) and asked the entire class what this is and we all echoed "water" because it was colourless and odourless. The teacher smiled and told us that this is worse than we can ever imagine. No one knowing what he was about to say, one of the students humorously told him that he should give him a glass to drink. He smiled again and told him that if he tastes the liquid, it will be the last thing he will ever taste. And he went further to explain to us what he experienced from one of his friend about acids when he was much younger. That was when I understood that some errors are not meant to be experienced personally for the sake of safety and other reasons. Even in other life's endeavours, you should learn more from other people mistakes to prevent you from making the same mistake.
The truth is that, no matter how bad someone may be, you can still learn a couple of things from them. Of course, you can learn from their errors, so as not to replicate the errors. Everyone has something to teach but only if you are willing to learn. For someone to learn from mistakes - either their own personal errors or from others, there are some factors that one needs to know.
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Firstly, your ability to learn from mistakes is an expression of your power of observation and attentiveness to details. That is, you have to be very attentive to details to know why something happened, what made it happen, and how to prevent the mistakes from happening again. You have to be able to focus your mind on not just the result but the processes that gave birth to the result. Of course, if someone gets it wrong with the process, they may get the final result wrong too. So when you pay attention to why things happen, and what people do to make them happen, you will know how to avoid the bad things from repeating, while enabling the good ones.
The next attitude to have handy in order to learn from mistakes is resilience. It takes a considerable level of resilience to be able to bounce back from what would have been a setback. One should know that being resilient does not mean immunity from taking the wrong step, but it means the ability to face oppositions and challenges squarely in order to take a better and right step in the next attempt. Always know that as long as you learn something from even a negative experience, then it is not completely bad.
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