The Most Dangerous Kind of Learning

Jason Zweig on learning from our mistakes

Mistakes are a key part of being human. They are a crucial part of learning. Either it’s a toddler learning to walk or a gymnast perfecting a routine, trial and error is really a significant part of how our brains and skills develop.

We learned to walk by walking and falling over and going again. And the same pattern continues for most of the rest of life: we are encouraged to take chances, make mistakes and learn from them. That’s how we learn and grow.

It’s important to learn from our mistakes, but learning from mistakes is easier said than done.

And in fact, whenever we make mistake and hope to learn from them, there’s a big danger to watch out for.

Learning Too Precise A Lesson

Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal once said in an interview:

But you have this idea that people are actually too good at learning lessons. When people keep making mistakes, it’s not always because they didn’t learn their lesson. It’s because they learn too precise a lesson.

And that I think is the most dangerous kind of learning.

I overheard a conversation a while ago between a lady and her friend. From all indications, the lady was relating a bad experience she’s had to her friend. And obviously hurt, she finished with, “…that’s why I’ve decided to stop being nice to people. When you are the nice one, people just take advantage of you.”

The lesson she learned from her — most certainly — painful experience was not, “I should be careful and use better judgement when being nice to people” The lesson she learned was, “I should stop being nice to people.”

It’s just one example of many. But it highlights how we could easily fall into the trap of learning too narrow lesson or the wrong kind of lesson from our mistakes.

Which is why sometimes the greatest mistake is not that we fail to learn from our mistakes, but that we learn the wrong lesson.

It is the most dangerous kind of learning.

Jason continued:

And it’s dangerous to learn narrow lessons. And I guess, the point is, you should try to invert the funnel. Instead of gathering a wide base to a narrow point and concentrating the lesson at the narrow point, you should turn it upside down, start from the narrow point and try to make the lesson broader.

People who have kids, I think you have confronted the same kind of problem where your kid does some wrong thing and you chastise the kid or you discipline the kid. And the kid won’t do that again. But the kid will do the similarly wrong thing again and what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to convey a general lesson from a specific kind of misbehavior. And that’s a difficult principle to convey. But I think with experience, people can learn it.

The Danger of “Never Again”

“Never again” is one of the commonest wrong lesson we often learn from our mistakes.

When something you try doesn’t work, when your best effort blows up in your face, when your love goes unrequited, when your heart gets broken, it’s so easy to default to “never again.”

• The last one was a messy breakup. Let my guard down? Never again.
• The last one was a dagger into the heart. Invest my time, my affection into somebody? Never again.
• The last one was crickets. Write another article? Never again.
• The last one brought no return on my time and or money invested. Try my hand at a business? Never again.
• Got the door slammed in my face the last time. Ask for what I want? Never again.

Mistakes can be painful and losses can be devastating. No doubt.

But the right lesson to learn from them — most times — is not to pack up and go home, but to find out what went wrong the last time? What can I do differently this time?

The evidence is there from your first attempt to walk as a toddler. Most things don’t work the first time out. Imagine the toddler saying after the first fall, “this walking thing is not for me.”

We make mistakes, we drop the ball, and sometimes they can be very painful. Rising from mistakes, making necessary adjustments is how we improve and grow. True learning is learning the right lessons from our mistakes.

Because, often times when we are rocked to the core, the greatest risk we run is not that we would fail to learn our lesson, it is that we would learn the wrong lesson.

And, that, is the most dangerous kind of learning.