by Aubrey Little

Created on: January 11, 2010   Last Updated: January 12, 2010

How to learn from mistakes

Learning from mistakes can take some practice, but it is well worth the effort. Mistakes dog us from the day we first start to move on our own and will continue until the day we stop moving altogether. It is one of life's little pleasures that require us to learn all about responsibility, humility, and acceptance when we, make mistakes.

What's more, we need to become schooled in the ability to forgive other people for their mistakes. The truly lucky are those who learn from the mistakes of others; before we can learn to overcome and learn from mistakes we need to understand a little more about what a mistake is and why we need to learn from them.

What is a mistake?

The answer to this question could be exceedingly long as there are multiple interpretations of the word mistake. For the purpose of this article, let's think of the term mistake in its most generic fashion.

Mistakes often result from people lacking sufficient knowledge to make a decision or plan of action, poor judgement or being careless in their actions. Sometimes this lack of knowledge or poor judgement can result in a series of misunderstandings, much like those that we have witnessed on sitcoms or in movies, but in life these moments are rarely comical to the person making the error in judgement and are often more than ill-timed for those who are involved in the incident as a bystander.

If mistakes are so bad, why do we have them?

According to the more senior of our generation, mistakes are meant to help us learn important lessons about life, about ourselves and about the human condition. For the younger crowd the idea of a noble purpose for mistakes is laughable, but we know that as humans we are prone to making mistakes.

We were blessed with free will, which opens the door to the wonderful world of woes – the mistake. Contrary to our common belief and perhaps even contrary to our desire to see ourselves as perfect, we all have been achievers in the mistake department.

Pretending that people don't make mistakes is tantamount to the pot calling the kettle black.  We would all like to believe that we have always acted within the bounds of sensible behaviour, only acting when we know and understand all the facts, so that misunderstandings don't occur, but this is the furthest from the truth.

Learning from mistakes is the most important purpose of mistakes; at least according to all of the teachers I've had the pleasure of knowing.  It is what

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