We all know the old cliché that “experience is the best teacher.” Perhaps that doesn’t tell the whole story.
More appropriately it should be “bad experiences are the best teachers.” We tend too take missteps much more seriously and reserve special places in our gray matter to avoid satisfying Einstein’s definition of insanity.
But do we assign as much weight to our experiences when the results are positive? I often find myself wondering why I no longer do some things that were very productive in the past. Why did I stop? Who knows?
If we only change our behavior as the result of “hard knocks,” we are relegated to the status of being reactionary. How much better would it be to take affirmative steps that produce measurable results without being prodded by errors?
Nobody is perfect. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying!
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