5 ms·

Why learn from the guy who made the mistakes when you can learn from the guy who didn't?

Millennium 13y ago
Because success generally changes things, while mistakes generally don't. You can't clone a previous success exactly, because its presence alters the environment from the one in which it was initially achieved, and you have to account for that. You essentially have to show the same sort of creativity as the original success showed, and thus you haven't really learned much. By contrast, things that were mistakes in the past tend to still be mistakes in the present. Usually they continue to be mistakes in the future as well. That's something you can really learn from, as you go through the creative process toward success that you were going to have to go through anyway.
- throwaway1979 13y ago
  A key word is "tend". I've tried to learn from past failures only to realize that the world has changed in a few short span and my lesson no longer applied. In the immortals words of a song "what was once good, now is bad". When one realizes this, life gets a bit harder.
jiggy2011 13y ago
I guess you should try and learn from both, but in general we pay more attention to the successes than the failures. As an extreme example, a lottery winner should say "you should play the lottery, it made me rich!" ignoring all of those who made an overall loss. Think of it like the housing crash, everybody knew somebody who was getting rich from property.
darkxanthos 13y ago
The best thing you can hope to learn from someone you view as having made no mistakes is that they've made just as many if not more than others. Also because survivorship bias: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias EDIT: Linked to Wikipedia
jdotjdot 13y ago
I'm not sure why you assume he didn't make any mistakes, or even that he didn't make any serious one. Just because he was ultimately successful doesn't mean there was a lot more behind it than pure "right-decision-making" or skill. How many great people never finished their works because of something completely outside of their control?
michaelochurch 13y ago
It's not either/or. You generally need to learn from both. The problem is social stratification. If you're a normal person, you end up mostly around people who didn't succeed and get only half the story. If you have a break-out success (or just luck) you end up in a world where everyone has, and there's a lot of self-congratulatory just-worlding. Either way, you get a biased account. I think it's most adaptive to learn from both sides while playing the attitude of the successful, to make yourself seem like a high-status person. You always want to seem (except to true friends whom you'd actually like to help, with accurate information) like you've had an unbroken chain of successes and can't imagine anything else; you just don't want that to bleed into self-deception. Maybe the reason why psychopaths do so well in life is that they're most resistant against cognitive dissonance. It's easy for them to maintain a successful front without falling into self-deception or delusion. For everyone else, there's nonzero cognitive load in doing that.
- vixus 13y ago
  > psychopaths do so well in life Do they?
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    On their own terms, yes. The serial killers are the lower classes of psychopaths, usually with other mental issues. They don't all become CEOs but they generally rise to the highest level permissible by their intelligence. An 80-IQ psychopath isn't going to rise to the top of a bank, but he will end up in a position of power over other people. Of course, they blow themselves up every few years or so, but they usually move away unharmed.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    I don't know if there's been a lot of rigorous academic research on the topic or not, but there have been a handful of articles in the pop business press, talking about the connection between being "CEO material" and displaying the traits of a psychopath. For example: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-some-psychopaths-make-great-ceos/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-som...

Because success generally changes things, while mistakes generally don't. You can't clone a previous success exactly, because its presence alters the environment from the one in which it was initially achieved, and you have to account for that. You essentially have to show the same sort of creativity as the original success showed, and thus you haven't really learned much. By contrast, things that were mistakes in the past tend to still be mistakes in the present. Usually they continue to be mistakes in the future as well. That's something you can really learn from, as you go through the creative process toward success that you were going to have to go through anyway.

throwaway1979 13y ago
A key word is "tend". I've tried to learn from past failures only to realize that the world has changed in a few short span and my lesson no longer applied. In the immortals words of a song "what was once good, now is bad". When one realizes this, life gets a bit harder.

jiggy2011 13y ago

I guess you should try and learn from both, but in general we pay more attention to the successes than the failures. As an extreme example, a lottery winner should say "you should play the lottery, it made me rich!" ignoring all of those who made an overall loss. Think of it like the housing crash, everybody knew somebody who was getting rich from property.

darkxanthos 13y ago

The best thing you can hope to learn from someone you view as having made no mistakes is that they've made just as many if not more than others. Also because survivorship bias: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias EDIT: Linked to Wikipedia

jdotjdot 13y ago

I'm not sure why you assume he didn't make any mistakes, or even that he didn't make any serious one. Just because he was ultimately successful doesn't mean there was a lot more behind it than pure "right-decision-making" or skill. How many great people never finished their works because of something completely outside of their control?

michaelochurch 13y ago

It's not either/or. You generally need to learn from both. The problem is social stratification. If you're a normal person, you end up mostly around people who didn't succeed and get only half the story. If you have a break-out success (or just luck) you end up in a world where everyone has, and there's a lot of self-congratulatory just-worlding. Either way, you get a biased account. I think it's most adaptive to learn from both sides while playing the attitude of the successful, to make yourself seem like a high-status person. You always want to seem (except to true friends whom you'd actually like to help, with accurate information) like you've had an unbroken chain of successes and can't imagine anything else; you just don't want that to bleed into self-deception. Maybe the reason why psychopaths do so well in life is that they're most resistant against cognitive dissonance. It's easy for them to maintain a successful front without falling into self-deception or delusion. For everyone else, there's nonzero cognitive load in doing that.

vixus 13y ago
> psychopaths do so well in life Do they?
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  On their own terms, yes. The serial killers are the lower classes of psychopaths, usually with other mental issues. They don't all become CEOs but they generally rise to the highest level permissible by their intelligence. An 80-IQ psychopath isn't going to rise to the top of a bank, but he will end up in a position of power over other people. Of course, they blow themselves up every few years or so, but they usually move away unharmed.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  I don't know if there's been a lot of rigorous academic research on the topic or not, but there have been a handful of articles in the pop business press, talking about the connection between being "CEO material" and displaying the traits of a psychopath. For example: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-some-psychopaths-make-great-ceos/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-som...