Thomas Edison, when he made public the process of creating the high-strength incandescent lamp after many tests and errors, said, “There were not thousands of failed attempts, it was a one-thousand-step invention. “What Edison’s words teach us is very significant: we can stumble several times, make many mistakes, but the important thing is always to learn.
Between 1878 and 1880, Edison worked on at least 300 theories to develop the effective incandescent lamp, demonstrating the importance of perseverance and willingness not to give up before the hour, as well as the will to stand.
“Why repeat old mistakes, have so many new mistakes to make?
-Bertrand Russell-
Making mistakes is very human, but what every mistake must teach us is to rise up and learn from what happened, there is no point in lamenting or seeking explanations in others, when it is really effective to think and learn the lesson. From an early age, they taught us that the best are the ones who are not wrong and hide from us that, to do what they do now, they have made countless mistakes, one after the other.
In 2011, Psychology and Aging published a survey that found that as we age, our brain learns more about our mistakes than from our successes. In this research, the results of trial and error learning were compared to those of error-free learning. , in memory exercises with groups of adults between 20 and 70 years old.
Two learning methods have been applied. One involved passive learning in which participants were given a category, such as “flower,” a related word, such as “pink,” and another method that consisted of learning trial and error: in which a category was given, but the person had to guess the related word.
The conclusion of this research was that older adults remembered keywords better when they learned them by trial and error.
This result is because older adults experience a gradual decrease in memory due to age, so they may remember better if they use the trial and error method, as they have to make associations that require more brain work.
“A man can make mistakes several times, but he only becomes a failure when he begins to blame others for his own mistakes.
-John Borroughs-
There are people who are unable to admit their mistakes, who are so demanding of themselves and others that any mistake is considered a failure and a defeat. Perfectionism can be a virtue to some extent, especially in the most relevant tasks, but it can be. harmful if every time a mistake is identified, an inner anger arises.
Avoiding perfectionism must be based on accepting ourselves and the idea that goals are flexible in the sense that they must adapt to cope with changing conditions. This does not mean that we have to give up our goals, but that we need to see them realistically and learn that there are different ways to achieve our goals.
An important aspect in order to accept the reality around us has to do with the celebration of conquests, if we go from punishment to punishment, forgetting one mistake only when another happens, we will not see everything that has been achieved.
Every mistake is a lesson, but one fundamental thing to avoid is to make the mistake over and over again, that is to constantly fall on the same stone, because it means that we do not evolve or learn. other people in the past where we have made a mistake, it is advisable to perform a conscience check and ask:
The answers to these questions will give us valuable help in moving forward.
“Our reward is in effort, not result. A total effort is a complete victory.
-Mahatma Gandhi-