If you haven’t heard this quote of Albert Einstein, you have heard nothing! Because, he said: ‘A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.’ The fact of the matter is that the more you work, the more the chances of making mistakes. In other words, how can you make mistakes when you do just about nothing?
Coming to the point, how does one achieve success in life? By making right decisions, right? How does one get into the habit of making right decisions? Obviously, by learning to make the right decision. Most of us learn to make the right decisions the hard way—by trial and error method. There is some procedure and methodology to it. If we start making all the right decisions without learning how to make them, that could be sheer fluke. But that’s not going to work each time. In fact, that is not going to be the case most of the time. We learn to make the right decisions by and by.
So, what is at the root of right decisions? What helps us to make right decisions? Of course, our experience. The more experienced we are, the less likely we are to make wrong decisions. We all know that people who lack experience are likely to make more and more mistakes as compared to people who are more experienced. That is why experience counts.
Now, how does one gain experience? Well, there lies the catch. Would you believe me if I told you that we gain experience through wrong decisions? Whether we like it or not, that is the whole truth. Our experience is the sum total of our right decisions as well as wrong decisions. When a decision turns out to be right, we must remember the situation and what decision we arrived at. Similarly, when we make a wrong decision, we must review the situation. We must consider the situation as well as our decision. And, we must try to find out as to where we went wrong. That’s not all. We must take corrective measures to redeem the situation once we realise that we have made a wrong decision. The important thing is to form our mistakes or wrong decisions. That is what experience is all about.
To sum up: Our success depends on making the right decisions. Our capability to make right decisions comes through experience. And, we gain experience by making wrong decisions and finding ways to correct the situation after making wrong decisions. If you have followed the point I am trying to make, you would have understood by now that it is our mistakes that pave the way to our success.
