Learning to learn the hard way

“A smart person learns from his mistakes, but a truly wise person learns from the mistakes of others.” — ― Ken Schramm

Key Points:

• Learning by failing is not too bad of an idea
• Waiting to learn from other’s mistakes costs you invaluable time
• But we should still make an effort to learn from other’s mistakes presently available

“A smart person learns from his mistakes, but a truly wise person learns from the mistakes of others.” — ― Ken Schramm

This is a concept that is known to me for a long time. After all, learning lessons from mistakes is a costly and expensive process. Many have well established that learning from the failure of others is a much more safer and effective strategy.

However, I would argue that learning to learn the hard way — by experiencing failure yourself, is a very valuable skill.

Singapore is a relative conservative country, strongly founded on Asian values where failure is not well tolerated and success is the expectation. It is no wonder why Asian parents hope that their child would pursue professional degrees in Medicine, Engineering and Law. These professions have a relatively stable job market and are high paying. This sort of salaried income mitigates most of the downside risk (unless you are fired of course). This also means that there is a lesser chance of failure and a level of guaranteed success. It is in this context where many people from Asian countries find it difficult to take risks and expose themselves to the chance of failure. Every new venture would be carefully researched, analyzing all precedents and trying to learn each and every lesson from the experiences of others.

While it is important to learn from the mistakes of others, we should not be hesitant to move forward when there is no one to learn from. This situation arises when moving into the cutting-edge technologies, testing out new business ideas or trailblazing a new career path. In history, we realize that the greatest innovations and achievements often come with little precedents. To redefine the future, we must be brave enough to venture beyond where our past has brought us.

For many, it is the first instinct to wait for someone to try something, see how they fare, and decide whether to try it for ourselves. We crave the assurance provided by others, we crave to reduce risk. However, by waiting for someone to “try it out first”, we are risking our time — which is arguably must more valuable than failure. Furthermore, the learnings and insights we take from having a personal experience of failure is much more in-depth than learning from the failure of others.

To give an example, take blockchain. Blockchain is at the frontiers of today’s technology, it is a platform that has the potential for countless businesses to be built on top of it. However, blockchain being a relatively new technology has many sceptics and its reliability is nowhere as well tested as traditional internet protocols. We have two options here:

1. Wait 5 years for more people to try it out, learn from their mistakes, then try it out yourself for the first time.

2. Start trying it out immediately, maybe fail 5 times in the process but by 5 years, you may have gained the insight to have built a successful blockchain-based technology.

Clearly, given the capital availability, option 2 sounds much more appealing. To be clear, I am not saying that we should not learn from the mistakes of others. We definitely should strive to learn from all the mistakes people have made. But we should never be hesitant to try when we find ourselves in situations where there is no one to learn from. We must be brave enough to be able to learn the hard way. To be brave enough to accept failure and continuing trying regardless.