Why I Always Look for Lessons in Everyday Life

And why failure is the best teacher of them all.

Let me get something straight — I don’t profess to be being an all-knowing, beard-stroking wizard with all the answers.

Life can be tumultuous, even when you’ve only had 22 years of it.

I’ve been in education for 90% of my life, yet I’ve only truly learned the value of, well, learning.

Ironic, isn’t it?

Through the ups and downs, I ‘shielded’ myself from actually dealing with any trauma by dumping any lessons in my brain’s wasteland.

That is our innate reaction — to protect ourselves.

It’s ironic (again); although education has ended, learning has properly only just begun.

Here are a few reasons why I believe it is crucial to always look for lessons in life.

Failure Doesn’t Appear So Bleak Anymore

I talk about it a lot in my blog posts, but rejection is something that always used to get to me.

I’d build it up in my head that I just wasn’t good enough.

The fact of the matter is, rejection is a part of life.

It was a lesson I had a hard time learning, and from time to time, I still need to remind myself. Even so, learning that lesson has stood me in much higher stead than just a few months ago.

Hell, I want to make a career out of writing, so being immune to rejection needs to be deep-rooted in my psyche.

Life Isn’t Glamorous

Life’s greatest gifts don’t always come wrapped in pretty packages. — Thought Catalog.

More often than not, the most significant lessons in life come after our darkest moments. Lessons don’t get delivered to your door in a pretty bow and sparkling wrapping paper. You need to go looking for them.

My life isn’t filled with glorious moments. Realising that prepares me for the darker ones.

Yeah, it sucks when the bad shit happens. But it isn’t the end of the world.

If time is the best healer, then the lesson learned is the therapist you need to move on.

It Prepares Me For the Next Test

Not searching for lessons from life experiences is like going into an exam without having done any revision.

Take Anthony Joshua, the IBF, WBO, WBA, and IBO heavyweight boxing champion and his victor, Andy Ruiz Jr. Although Joshua unexpectedly lost in their first fight, guess who won their rematch?

That’s right; the guy who learned his lessons.

Joshua went into the rematch much more prepared. Ruiz didn’t. He put his newly learned skills to the test and dominated the fight; winning his titles back.

The thing is, it doesn’t even need to be on such a grand scale.

Take writing, for instance. Some articles get hundreds of views; others get six. Will I keep writing pieces similar to that? No, of course not.

Take a mental note of where you went wrong or how you reacted to a particular event.

That article you were so excited about didn’t do so well? Why not? Was it written poorly, or was the subject matter just not exciting?

Analyse and learn — always.

I Find Inspiration Everywhere

When at work, my brain doesn’t shift out of first gear. If anything, I feel like I am losing brain cells.

Even so, there is the voice in the back of my head that just won’t switch off.

“What can I learn?”

As I said earlier, life isn’t glamorous. Opportunities, like lessons, aren’t handed to you on a platter. So I flipped the mundanity of my situation on its head and wrote this as a consequence:

Learning Doesn’t Always Mean Succeeding

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” — Albert Einstein

It is all well and good seeking the lessons from the rollercoaster that is life.

But I am not a perfect person. No one is.

Besides, that would be boring.

There’s beauty to be found in imperfection, as ugly as it may seem.

Consequently, I am always learning. Sometimes, I learn the wrong lesson, and things don’t go the way I had planned.

I’ll give you an example. Following my parent’s divorce (sombre topic, I know), I quickly learned the value of independence; a crucial skill everyone must learn. At times, however, it didn’t work in my favour. I’d lean in too hard with my new-found knowledge and create friction in the house.

So yes, by all means, I implore you to search for lessons in everything you do. Just know that sometimes you will be left short-handed. But guess what?

That’s just another lesson.

Failure is the Best Teacher of Them All

Can you guess the recurring topic in this article?

I thought so.

Failure is by far the best teacher out there.

Take the Harvard Business Review’s case study on the newly formed Ducati Moto GP racing team in 2003. Success here is directly related to the commercial success of the company.

To put it simply, it matters.

So, Ducati became the model of learning. The team fitted its bikes with sensors that captured data on 28 performance parameters.

As a result, they performed much better than expected. The bike was the fastest on the track and came second.

Then, they stopped learning.

Come the next season, they drastically changed the bike and didn’t analyse the data.

They came third the following year.

While that is no easy feat, it was viewed as a failure.

The case study concluded that success led the Ducati racing team to stop learning, and only a perceived failure caused it to start again. After its disappointing third-place finish, the team reexamined its approach to developing bikes.

Ducati aren’t the only ones.

Albert Einstein couldn’t read until he was seven and psychiatrists considered to be mentally handicapped. He won a Nobel Prize, and everyone knows who he is to this day.

Henry Ford went broke five times before Ford took off.

Failure is inevitable.

So why not learn from it?