Do you think we learn from mistakes?
We don’t.
Not when we’re told we’re making a mistake.
Not when we know we’re making a mistake.
Not even when the mistakes we’re making negatively affect our lives. (Just ask smokers about that one.)
Only the smartest people learn from mistakes, and only geniuses learn from the mistakes of others. The rest of us learn from pain. We don’t realize drinking too much is a bad idea until we wake up the next day with a throbbing headache. And once the pain goes away we forget and make the same mistake again.
Decisions aren’t made rationally (as much as we’d like to believe that), they’re made with emotion. Afterwards we use reason to make ourselves feel better. Sadly, knowing what’s right doesn’t equate with doing it.
So how do we learn?
Pain. But pain isn’t enough. We need the fear of pain to scare us straight. Pain alone is bearable. It’s certain, finite, manageable. Fear of an unknown pain, of an unbearable future is the real motivator.
I asked the most positive and productive individual I know what keeps him motivated.
“I’m afraid of wasting my life,” he said. “Afraid of growing old and seeing myself as a missed opportunity, as someone who could have been what they wanted, but didn’t want it enough.”
Life is now, and it’s all real. This moment has no second chances.
Scare yourself straight.
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Interesting point - we do learn from pain.
But don’t forget the carrot part . . .
We learn from pleasure as well.
Powerful words, thanks for sharing. I’m going to print that quote as a consistent (and nagging)reminder of what each moment represents.
Great post. I posted something along the same vein about how to learn through accepting mistakes and not always knowing right. Most recent post on the blog.
Peace & Thanks,
Wade
quadzilla,
You have a point about pleasure. Without biscuits it would be impossible to teach a dog a new trick. Pleasure teaches us to learn positive things, while pain teaches us not to do negative things.
Nice post, John. I like the idea of the pleasure-pain principle within the two posts. We seek pleasure and avoid pain, but we learn from both. I believe that pain can be more immediate than pleasure, leading us to become more concerned with avoidance of pain and hence paying more attention to it.
It’s nice to be a genius.
I agree, John. It’s the pain and the fear of it that drives change. But I think it’s necessary to understand that the consequences of our mistakes can drive that pain. So if I make mistakes regarding my choices of men, for example, I pay the consequences of those ridiculous choices. Eventually, I become fearful regarding men because of the pain I’ve experienced due to the mistakes I made in choosing a man in the first place. All kinds of baggage can arise out of that, but eventually, hopefully, change will occur - I’ll stop making the mistake of choosing the same, ridiculous type of man that causes me pain. Maybe I’m splitting hairs, here.
“If you do what you did you get what you got”8x Mr olypmia Ronnie Coleman. Just K.I.S.S!
Kept It Simple S….
Right on.
Woah, I have a big bone to pick with the article’s premise. I think the role of pain is mistaken here. Pain is absolutely necessary in life to guide our actions. People with leprosy lose parts of their body because they don’t feel pain, and researchers found that absolutely no substitute for it worked. They still ended up hurting themselves. Pain acts as a boundary. But to actually achieve, and especially learn, it’s positive motivation that is needed. Something that attracts and pulls you. Negative motivation, according to my theory of motivation, tends to hurt you, and doesn’t really help you learn. It makes you avoid things, and can lead to burnout. For this reason, focusing on the negative will definitely not motivate or help you learn. I’ve seen it time and time again that it really hurts people when they are fearful, consciously or subconsciously.
The people that learn the most, and I know this from experience, are motivated by something that attracts them positively. A great source of motivation to learn unbelievably is the motivation for mastery or perfection of something. I’ve learned 4 foreign languages this way, and achieved many other things I’m proud of. It works like a charm. The problem is, you can’t always motivate yourself when you want to. That’s why I’m reading on your site. To learn more about how to activate that positive motivation to learn and achieve.
Dave
Dave,
You make a good point and I agree that positive motivation is essential for sustainability.
When I wrote this post I was thinking of the galvanizing nature of pain. For someone in a bad slump pain is often the force that gets you to take action for the first time. Afterwards positive motivation is necessary to keep making progress.
Thanks for the insightful comment.
[…] how we really learn […]
I agree with Dave
pain is essential for growth in humans for it is a source of fuel we need to move forward.
i often find myslef being motivated when i have been hurt either from friends family or my girlfriend, they provide me with anger which fuels my motivation and helps pull my self together to make further progress.
Im 21 and feel it is going to be a difficult trek making the decisons which will mould my life. i have to be confident and fearless.
Best of luck in your journey, Ahdel.
Yes, we can learn from experiences that we want to avoid repeating, but we are more motivated by positive reinforcement (what non-psych people often refer to as rewards) than from negative reinforcement (what non-psych people often refer to as punishment). More importantly we don’t learn from the mistake itself, at least not much more than it was a mistake, what we learn from is the feedback from the mistake. Specifically, if you’re a computer programmer and a piece of code isn’t working the way you expect, but you don’t know why, you haven’t learned anything; when you find your mistake and the code works (a) you have learned what not to do and what to do, in the context of that specific problem, and you have hopefully been positively reinforced by the successful resolution of the problem at hand. (If you repeatedly are not successful at resolving the problem, you (a) don’t learn a solution to your problem and you (b) likely are negatively reinforced and become discouraged.)
[…] Pain is the word most associated with labor. Women go to great lengths to deal with the discomforts of childbirth. They attend classes, buy products, read books and talk to their friends. However, relaxation is the one essential ingredient, often overlooked, which helps with the reduction of painful contractions. When Moms have fear in labor, their body tenses. When there is tension (opposite of relaxation), there is pain. Relaxation takes away the fear, therefore, reducing tension and pain. You can’t have relaxation and tension at the same time. […]
[…] to calculate how much time young children need to learn whatever. What we know for sure is that they learn almost continuously, from any source of knowledge that they are exposed to. Give your kid a source of knowledge that […]
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