Why Mistakes Are Your Best Real Teachers: Using Mistakes To Get Smarter

A baby learns to walk by falling down. Next, the child learns to ride a bicycle by falling off the bicycle. Then they go to school and are taught. “Making mistakes makes you stupid.” That is insanity.

The moment you operate from the concept of “right and wrong,” your intelligence is cut in half. This is why standing on the edge of the coin – seeing both sides rather than taking sides – increases your intelligence.

Think for yourself.

Parents, out of love and a desire to prepare their children for life when they are gone, teach students not to make mistakes so they can be accepted socially.

You cannot know what you do not know. In other words, be very aware of the mistakes you will be making.

Mistakes are great – the more you make the smarter you get.

The author quotes: “My mistakes are my mistakes. Your mistakes are your mistakes. In other words, my mistakes are customized to me. Your mistakes are customized just for you”.

The most important thing that can be done is to make mistakes and learn from them.

Learning from mistakes starts with first admitting you made a mistake and then using love and compassion to learn God’s customized lesson, just for you. Then mistakes will make you smarter.

The authors discussed a few important lesson that he learned:

• From Sunday School, I learned “lead us not into temptation.”
• In today’s dysfunctional society, the temptation is to:
• Pretend to never make mistakes. People like to pretend they are perfect.
• Lie.
• Make excuses.
• Blame is really two words: “be” and “lame.”
• Go to court.
• Go big or go home.
• Bernie Madoff should be running the U.S. government, the biggest Ponzi scheme in world history.

Mistakes are the key to success:

• Thomas Edison changed the world by making mistakes. He reported failing 3,000 times before inventing the electric light bulb. Henry Ford went bankrupt before Ford Motor Company became a success. And Jeff Bezos’ Amazon-offshoot zShops failed.
• Colonel Sanders had to reinvent himself many times and found himself broke at age 65 before KFC succeeded.

The Power of Practice

Tiger Woods did not become the greatest golfer in the world without practicing, making millions of mistakes, and hitting millions of practice golf balls. Also in the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell states no band in history practiced more than the Beatles. Gladwell also wrote that talent alone is not sufficient to guarantee success. The difference is hours of practice. The Beatles played up to eight hours a night for years before becoming successful. Doctors, lawyers, and dentists do not call their business a business. Professionals call their business a practice. Practice on you.

Translation: Real teachers practice what they teach. Fake teachers do not.

As Fuller said, “Mistakes are sins only when not admitted.”

Give and you shall receive. A better saying is, teach and you will learn.

Mistakes are the key to real success.

The fear of losing creates more losers.

Money is a crazy subject. People do crazy things for money, even kill a loved one, deal in drugs, sell their body, marry for money, or work at a job they hate.

The more a person avoids financial risk the greater financial risks they take.

Risk-averse people fall into four distinct categories:

1. The Worker: A risk-averse person will play the lottery, bet on the ponies or sporting events, or go to Las Vegas and pretend to be a high-roller.

2.The Student: The reason student loan debt is the U.S. government’s number one asset is because there is a quasi-religious belief in education, that a good education can be salvation from the harsh cruel world.

3.The Criminal: Many honest, risk-averse people become petty criminals. They work for cash; they do not have to pay taxes.

The fear of failure is a powerful human emotion. For most people, the fear of financial failure paralyzes them, keeps them small, poor, and obedient. For a few people, the fear of failing financially inspires them to learn, to become real students, and to seek real teachers. Mistakes are not failures. For this person, mistakes are real learning experiences. Each failure – although painful – is a lesson in humility, for only through genuine humility, does a person learn.