Do We Learn More From Mistakes Or Successes?

Prompt: “A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”  -Alexander Pope

Topic: Do we learn more from finding out that we have made mistakes or from our successful actions? 

I believe that we can learn from every single experience. Mistake or success. Both are very beneficial and crucial for every human being. I do think that we may learn a little more from our mistakes than our successes.

Look at it. A lot of the time, people get things wrong more than they get it right. This is backed up by math. If there is one way to do something right, and an infant number of ways to do it wrong, it is more likely that you will get it wrong. I don’t want to sound like a pessimistic person, but it’s true. Sense we get things wrong more than we get things right, we have more opportunities to learn from our mistakes than our success.

If we take every opportunity to learn, then we learn more from our mistakes because we make more of them. I don’t know if that makes sense to you, but that’s how I see it.

Learning how to make the most of situations when you’re wrong is very helpful. Some things you may learn from your mistakes are as follows. Patients, perseverance, positivity, and a lot more. You also learn what you like and don’t like, what you want and don’t want, and what you need and don’t need. By learning from a mistake, it was never a mistake but a successful way of learning. If you don’t learn from your mistake, you put unnecessary stress on you and others. Not to mention that you risk making that some mistake again.

In order to learn from your error, you need to change your mindset from “this is a mistake”, to “this is yet another opportunity to learn and develop.” Once you do that, the actual learning part falls into place. Look over what exactly went wrong, and where it started going down hill. Think about what you could have and should have done differently. It really depends on the situation, but that’s the beginning of learning from your errors and mistakes.

Even though we can learn a lot from our mistakes, I don’t want to say that we don’t learn from our success, because that’s simply not true. We learn what’s right, and what we should be doing more of. Success also keeps you going. If you only ever made mistakes, you would give up eventually. Our success and doing the right thing is just as important as out mistakes.

I agree with what Alexander Pope said. I believe that no one should be ashamed or scared to make a mistake. Mistakes are part of life, and like he said, they make us wiser today than we were yesterday. The only real mistake is not learning from our mistakes.

In conclusion, I don’t have a strong opinion about if we learn from mistakes or successes more. Like I said, we learn from both, and they are both critical for learning. I hope you enjoyed this essay. Thank you for reading, and have a spectacular day!