The Worst Advice I’ve Ever Heard

There is a quote going around that I’ve recently heard, “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” Huh? This may be some of the worst advice ever.  And while this quote, originally made by German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck in the mid-1800’s, may have had significant context around it, and could have made more sense at the time, I’ve read so many iterations of this recently, that it is making my head spin.

The quote instead should say, “no one learns from the mistakes of others.” Or maybe try John Dewey’s quote from the same era, “ Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks, learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” Sounds more accurate to me.

Just think back to all the things you’ve learned when you’ve failed. Would any of those things been possible if it had been someone else, instead of you, making the mistake? Think about the D you got on your final exam in your Humanities class, when you waited until the 2-hours before class to study. If it was your roommate instead, who procrastinated and took the bad grade, would you have learned anything? Yeah, me neither. Personally, I really wish my brother got 7 speeding tickets in high school, was regularly grounded, and constantly owing money to local law enforcement, but something tells me I would not have “learned” a thing, if it had been him (though I won’t disagree I was a fool in those scenarios).

Honestly, who wouldn’t want to “assign” their failures to others. But, then who would we be without any mistakes? I know I wouldn’t be a glimmer of who I am today if I never made a mistake – none of us would. We need to take risks…and lose! We need to make bad decisions and suffer consequences. We grow from this process. Just as paying those speeding tickets taught me to slow down, or losing a client because we didn’t execute teaches me harsh sales lessons with my company. Mistakes must be made the good old-fashioned way – on our own. This pushes us to re-evaluate what went wrong, why we failed, what we could have done differently, and then apply that to the next time it happens. It’s a love-hate, but it needs to happen.

The more important challenging question to ask is, what are you going to learn from your mistakes? Are you going to dwell on them, and let them eat you alive? Are you going to move along and act like you couldn’t care less, or are you going to alter behavior based on the lesson learned in the failure? Hopefully it’s the latter. Just check out these 23 “failures” who turned their ship around. Don’t make the mistakes worthless, use them – and you’re certainly no fool for doing so.