Experience Teaches Only the Teachable

The most overrated skill is to never make a mistake. The most underrated skill is to never repeat one. We all make mistakes and we should learn from them, but when people say they learn from their mistakes it’s sometimes said as if it’s an immutable law, like gravity or thermodynamics. Mistakes are only a chance to learn, they do not guarantee any lessons or skills; mistakes or experience teaches only the teachable.

The fact that we are slow to learn from mistakes has been repeated in a different form, over and over:

“Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”

George Santayana

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

George Bernard Shaw

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

Aldous Huxley

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

George Orwell

Without the ability to recognize mistakes, somehow accept them, then spark a legitimate change, we are doomed to repeat them perpetually. There is a better chance that experiences, or mistakes, will have value in the future when whatever went wrong is studied…