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Daily Leadership Thought #127 – Learn From Your Mistakes

April 27, 2011

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All successful people that I know learn from their mistakes and readily admit them.  In fact, it is often a big mistake or two that ends up being a pivotal point in their career.  If you aren’t making mistakes then you aren’t taking enough risks or pushing yourself hard enough to get a true understanding of your potential.  You have to be willing to risk failure to achieve real success.  Otherwise you end up riding the waves of mediocrity that most people navigate their whole lives.

If you approach it with the right attitude, making mistakes can be a great catalyst for learningDebriefing the cause and effect of your actions and understanding what you should do differently next time builds professional maturity and personal humility.  This doesn’t mean that you embrace failure as the end objective, quite the contrary, however, when things don’t go as planned you accept it, learn from it and move on.

When success comes too easily people often don’t appreciate it.  They start to believe that what made them successful is something inherent to their being rather than the result of experience, timing, hard work, determination, sound judgment, and some good luck.  They start to have opinions on all sorts of things they know very little about and believe their actions to be almost bulletproof.   In most cases, life has a way of humbling them and teaching them that failure is a part of human existence.  No one moves through life unscathed or without necessary lessons to learn.  The important question for you to consider is, “are you leaning what business and life is trying to teach you?”