“You learn from your mistakes” is a common phrase you’ve likely heard throughout your life.
If you closely study common human behavior, you’ll see that this sentence applies to our lives more often than it should.
For example, if you closed down a business that didn’t succeed, you’d likely tell yourself not to make the mistake of starting a business again. You’d tell yourself to go find a good job and forget about starting another business.
The real notion of learning from your mistakes means you should do better at the same endeavor again by not repeating the mistakes of the past.
The phrase never said “You should stop doing a certain thing once you fail at it”—in a broader sense, that might be wrongly understood as a mistake.
Most of us have this impulse of quitting too early and calling our efforts a mistake. That is because we want to have success now, or in a few months, or in a few years.
Success to most people comes when they play the game long enough—if you want to succeed, you need to be in it for the long term.
Know that “learn from your mistakes” means to do better the next time you’re in a similar situation.
You stand to gain nothing if you call the entire game “a mistake,” quit too early, and move on to some other endeavor.
After a while, jumping from one endeavor to another might make you realize that quitting too early and moving on from one endeavor to another is actually the “biggest mistake.”
Learn from your mistakes and improve in the current situation. Don’t make the mistake of totally changing the entire context.