How To Learn From Your Mistakes

I’ve always appreciated this wisdom from Randy Pausch, of Last Lecturefame:

“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

It’s a great encapsulation of the value that comes with learning from our mistakes. And it’s a good summary of one way we learn from our mistakes. We try something. We make a decision. And it doesn’t work the way it was supposed to. Then we gain experience, we learn that next time we’re in that situation we should do something else or make a different decision.

But there’s another way we can learn from our mistakes. A deeper way.

Gary Kasparov, the long-time world chess champion, once outlined how he sought to learn from mistakes as he developed his world-class mind. In the book Loonshots, author Safi Bahcall outlines how Kasparov thinks:

“After a bad move costs him a game, however, Kasparov analyzes not just why the move was bad, but how he should change the decision process behind the move.In other words, howhe decided on that move, in that moment, in the context of that opponents, and what that means for how he should change his decision-making and game-preparation routine in the future.

I love this insight. Beyond how it avoids the temptation to just rationalize the outcome we got with trite phrases like “everything…