You are going to make a lot of mistakes in life if you are intent on growing or not. You are going to fail constantly, you are going to feel pain. That’s one of the costs of living.
However, not everyone sees mistakes and failures the same way. Some will fail and keep failing, moving around in circles and failing at the same thing repeatedly. As it has been rightly said, those who do not learn from the past are bound to repeat it.
You are going to make mistakes, but you are not supposed to keep making the same mistakes. Failures show us the way by showing us which isn’t the way. If you cannot learn from your failures, if you don’t understand why you failed the first time and avoid those pitfalls, you are destined to keep failing at the same thing. And trust me, that’s terrible.
The point of failing is so you can make progress, because then, you know which isn’t the way forward and you take another path. But if you refuse to acknowledge that the path you are on is not leading anywhere, then you keep going in circles and keep coming back to where you started from.
Failures only make sense when you learn from them. One of the beautiful things about life is that things keep happening again–in different ways, yes, but the principle behind them tend to be constant. A situation you find yourself in now, might repeat itself in another way in the future, but learning from your failures now would help you avoid making a similar mistake in the future.
We make mistakes even with the best of intentions, and avoiding to learn from it because it was for a good cause is not a way to progress.
There is knowledge, and there is internalizing the knowledge; the latter is the true sign of learning.
Our journey through life would be greatly inhibited if we have to learn afresh with every encounter. We go through some encounters so that we can apply the lessons learnt later, not just for now. And that makes us progress through life with a confidence that we have learnt something from our past failures.
Life is about making progress and progress comes from learning from our failures.
Failure is part of life, and learning doesn’t mean you have to keep failing at the same thing and repeating the same mistakes. You have to make progress.
It is okay to fail more than you win, but your wins must significantly outweigh the failures before it. Simply put, you have to learn from your failures, because that is the only justification for failing.
