Learn from your mistake, which is the best way to improve yourself.
I am pretty sure that you will have heard that sentence at least once. Well we should be learning from our mistakes as it will enable us to avoid those mistakes again and also clear the path for us. But I was asking the question to myself “What is the best way to improve? Is there a better way to improve than just waiting for mistakes to happen and learn from them?”
Unknown to me (with obvious reasons), there has been many research happened around this as well as many people talked about this. To list few I found in the Internet.
http://realtor-resources.com/learn-from-your-success
http://michaelhyatt.com/quotes/learning-from-your-success
http://www.vanseodesign.com/online-business/how-you-limit-your-success/
There are few reasons that I can figure out why we should be focusing on our successes over the mistakes
Successes are proven but failures are not
When you consider the typical way of learning from mistakes, you will analyze the mistake and understand why it was made. Then make up a good plan so that it will not happen again.
There is only one problem with this. You have a plan not something proven to be correct. This plan can go right or can go wrong as well. There is no guarantee about plan’s success.
But if you follow the same process for leaning form successes, the plan you are going to make to follow is based on proven results rather than extrapolating a failure. This plan can go wrong at any given time as well. But if you are presented with two plans, one based on success and other based on failure, what will you select?
Many successes and fewer failures
When you reflect back your life, I am pretty sure that you will realize that there are many successes and only few failures. This may be against the surface belief that we do mostly fail and suffer, frustrated about our work life, etc. But if you detail each and every major incident happened to you, you will realize that success rate is much higher than failure rate. If failure rate is higher, I am pretty sure that you are not doing this job.
OK what this has to do with learning from success? Pretty simple. There are many learning points if you focus on successes compared to looking at failures.
Conclusion
When we try to improve, when we try to learn, the best way to do that is to start looking at our successes. Looking at failures would help if you have a plan is based on successes. Looking at failures would help you verify your plan from successes.
Anuradha Gajanayaka 