Learn from mistakes

The lessons you learn from making mistakes, are not always the lessons that you wanted to learn, but they usually end up being the best lessons possible for you to learn from in the most productive way.


Never be discouraged because we all make mistakes and which are really just sharpening your learning curve. Learn and sharpen, and sharpen and learn, and you will make less mistakes, and get better as you build on your learning's. Becoming discouraged and feeling guilty for making our mistakes are of course perhaps always one of the biggest of mistakes that we can make.

The author and motivational speaker, Stephen R Covey once made a very pointed and poignant observation about making mistakes. He is the well known author of the book, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", first published in 1989.

He said the following:
"Don't argue for other people's weaknesses. Don't argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and then learn from it, immediately."

And is this true I asked myself?
I think that for myself I nearly always try to defend my weaknesses, when someone points them out to me, as I don't often readily admit them, either to myself or to others. I don't like criticism and I will defend myself, even if I am wrong or even when it is the truth that they are telling me. I will try to say that it's not actually true in all circumstances, and maybe I might then admit to it only in one small instance.

Setting up a defence like this is not building a learning curve, and then moving on, with the lesson firmly on board. It's usually staying right where you are, and it is only defending your own current position. Doing this you become entrenched more in your present position, and so you will have a harder time learning what really needed to be learnt from this criticism, or from this learning experience. For in truth all experiences are learning experiences if we remain humble enough to see the lesson contained in it, and when we are big enough to admit to our own faults, and then to admit that we don't know it all, already.

There is learning in every experience, and we can learn from every experience.

It's much better not to argue about our weaknesses or strengths, or to argue about anything. Just admit to your actual position which includes any mistakes and any weaknesses and try to see the truth that is in all things. This is what Covey's quote is really saying. He wants us to follow truth, and to not try to only steer ourselves.


away from truth by defending falsehoods, or mistakes, or even our beliefs.

Admit to the truth as soon as you see it, and so more quickly recognise the false paths and the mistakes, and then return again back to the truth, for this remains for all of us, the only real path forward. You can only go forward from a mistake by seeing the bigger picture in which the mistake has occurred, and perhaps seeing now that it is no longer a mistake, but actually it is a part of your overall journey, and the life picture that you are taking or painting, for yourself.

All mistakes therefore serve you, and move you on to learn the lessons that will take you to the next mistake, or lesson always endlessly coming towards you. It's all in how you view it, as a mistake or as a lesson, and that's life, your life, simply the way that life is and set up to be. Life then is either seen as a series of mistakes, or a series of life lessons and learning experiences. No life is a mistake, and all of us are learning this in one way or another. And there's no mistake about that!

There is an interesting paradox existing in some of our lives here about making mistakes in our lives. Some of us are not really looking for solutions or lessons from our making of these mistakes at all. Solutions are not what you actually want, you only want not to have a problem. You only do not want to make another such mistake.

The truth is though that you will keeping making similar mistakes, and sometimes the very same mistake, until you learn the particular life learning lesson that is always embedded into the mistakes somewhere.

Every mistake is an opportunity to learn and to expand our self knowledge to a point past where this particular mistake can ever occur in that exact way ever again. We need to learn to learn from our mistakes, so as we do not need to revisit them once more again. Life is a hard taskmaster, and it always ensures that you will learn in one way or another. The lesson is always about learning another new aspect about love, and the way that love works, and can work for us all in our lives

The way past problems and their annoying influence is to see the problem for what it is. When you first recognise a problem, the first step is to simply accept it, and then to just live with it for now. Accept it, look at it from different angles and perspectives, and love it and what is might be bringing to you, and treat it with a real respect.

Allow the problem to actually begin to solve itself,
as you and your life grow together into where the problem is moving you towards. If you stop, and if you are stopped by your problems, you will never get past them to where you are really going, and to a point where these problems will actually all then drop off for themselves. All problems disappear when you grow yourself past the point of now seeing them as a problem to now embracing them as just another aspect of love, and an opportunity to grow into that love, and to learn and to understand it more.

God allows us to reach the low points in life, because this is the only way to ever reach the high points.

Learning from the lowest points of your life is always the greatest of your learning's at any point in your life. You learn the most from the hardest of lessons. The learning is forced into you in some way, because you are now really intensely listening and at last paying full attention.

A mistake might be, for example to eat junk foods for so many years that you become a diabetic, and then finally this becomes a great learning of some of the underlying truths of your inner and outer being. And so you now become diet conscious, learning all about nutrition, and establishing a linkage from your physical self, back to your own thoughts and ways of believing, and establishing whether you are now acting responsibly or not.
In short you learn to love yourself as you are, and to then make the very best of where you find yourself right now, for the rest of your ongoing remaining life.

You have perhaps learned the hard way, but the truth is that now you have actually finally learned that which you could have not leant in any other way. A mistake is usually the very best way to learn, and an unparalleled opportunity to learn what not to do the next time around.

Learning is really about the aware observing of our own mistakes.
"We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state." Ralph Waldo Emerson ( 1803 to 1882) American philosopher.