The Seeds of Ruin
6th April 2023
ZMan turns over a rock.
The expression, “you learn more from your failures than from your successes” is largely true on the individual level, with some obvious exceptions. If you are a bomb disposal man or you pack your own parachute, the lesson you learn from your failure is short lived, but for most other things the expression holds. What we think of as wisdom is mostly just experience, which is a nice way of saying mistakes. Moreover, success often leads to future error due to learning the wrong lesson.
This holds for groups of people. Sports teams that have a run of luck often fall into bad habits and then experience a collapse. They confused luck for talent. On the other hand, the young team that struggled through losses, learning hard lessons along the way, often comes out the other side as a good team. They made all the mistakes necessary to be terrible, and therefore learned the lessons required to win, so they emerged from the experience equipped to win.
It is a standard aphorism in the military that success comes from experience and experience comes from failure. I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard that when I was in the Navy.