Mistakes: The learning opportunities

One thing that is very essential to have success in any endeavor is Mistakes.

There is a saying that:

“The Person Who Never Makes a Mistake Will Never Make Anything”

Mistakes presents the best learning opportunities and they provide the essential feedback mechanism to improve any system or strategy.

When mistakes are incorporated in any strategy as a feedback mechanism they minimizes the chances of the same mistakes again.

The key is, to never hesitate to do anything because of the fear of mistakes and the rule is to never repeat the same mistake.

If we fail faster, we’ll succeed sooner.
  -- Tom Peters

All the Masters in their respective fields do make mistakes and in fact they make BIG and a diverse range of mistakes and they keep learning from those mistakes that helps them to be the master of their trade.

Mistakes are inevitable, be it the legendary athlete like Michael Jordan

“I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.”
  -- Michael Jordan

Or,

from the realm of investing “The Oracle of Omaha” the great Warren Buffet himself.

Buffet invested in early 1990′s in a shoe company called Dexter Shoes after analyzing the competitive advantage (“Moat” as Buffet calls it) of the company at that time.

But, as it turns out, the company lost its competitive advantage in subsequent years and eventually proved to be a bad investment amounting to the loss of whopping $3.5 Billion.

Was it disappointing for him ?

Certainly ... Yes

Did that deter him from his core value investing approach ?

Definitely ... No

Actually, it only helped him to strengthen his approach by learning from his mistakes and to apply more diligence in subsequent endeavors.

In his own words:

“Dexter is the worst deal that I’ve made. But I’ll make more mistakes in the future – you can bet on that.”

Like all the other masters, he is never shy of making more mistakes because he knows the importance of mistakes and the invaluable learning from them in the process of success.

In order to succeed, we too need to embrace mistakes as inevitable part of life and do the necessary course correction.