People keep telling me that we learn most from our mistakes. I think it’s a cliché and misleadingly wrong. The only good stuff I've seen from mistakes is an appreciation not to make that same mistake again, and sometimes a sense of personal resilience - though that occurs only if the mistake is followed by a subsequent success. All the rest of the 'good stuff' - if we mean learning and creativity - comes from success, from finding out what the thing to do actually is (as distinct from what it is not, the mistake).
You learn next to no ‘content’ from a mistake. By content here, I mean information that we need. Let’s say, for example, that you’re putting a wifi code into your computer and you get it wrong by one letter. You remembered the rest of the code correctly, but there’s one letter that is eluding you. You try a ‘t’, and it’s wrong.
As a grown-up, you resist smashing the machine and instead have another go - invoking your resilience. What do we know about the correct letter? Only that it is not a ‘t’, so we have learned not to input ‘t’ again. But that leaves at least 25 other options (before we consider caps, symbols and numbers). How do we know which it is? Not from the mistake. Only by guessing correctly or remembering the right letter or looking it up again in our records. Only if we can enter it correctly next time have we learnt anything. We have learned from the success.
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