When you make a mistake, big or small, cherish it as the most precious thing in the world. Because in some ways, it is. 60 . Most of us have been taught from a young age that mistakes are bad. And we are reminded that we should try to avoid mistakes. We’ve been scolded when we make mistakes — at home, school and work. Maybe not always, but probably enough times to make feeling bad about mistakes an unconscious reaction. Yet without mistakes, we could not learn or grow. 61 . We don’t really consume information and instantly know it or know how to do it. Instead, we get information about something, from reading or from another person or from observing usually; then we construct a model in our mind, test it out by trying it in the real world, make mistakes, revise the model based on the results of our real-world experimentation and repeat, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, until we’ve pretty much learned how to do it well. 62 . If you succeed at something, it’s probably something you already knew how to do it. You haven’t really grown much from that success — at most it’s the last step on your journey, not the whole journey. Most of the journey is made up of mistakes. By trial and error, we try out new strategies and make new discoveries, thus leading to higher payoffs. So if you value learning, if you value growing and improving, then you should value mistakes. 63
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