Making mistakes is a normal part of life, but why do most of us repeat the same mistakes even though we are not advised to learn from our mistakes from an early age?
Under perfect conditions, mistakes would serve as a way to improve and upgrade, which would never lead to the same mistake again. But we all know that reality is not perfect.
Imagine that you want to save money to buy something bigger (car for example), but instead you continue to often spend money on dining in a restaurant, although it is clear that you would save that money if you cook at home, so you really start to you feel guilty about it.
While such everyday mistakes are usually just annoying, repeated mistakes sometimes carry a lot of weight. For example, the recurrence of medical errors leads to the loss of life.
Repeating small mistakes leads to lawsuits of negligence. So if we know we are wrong, why not do something to avoid mistakes?
Science shows us that we do not actually learn from our mistakes. Instead, going back to making mistakes makes us very sad and upset, which practically leads to even more mistakes in the future.
According to some scientific research, when we face mistakes, our brain slows down and tries to find out why we made a mistake, which leads us to think about the mistake instead of the solution.
Then this wrong behavior is encoded in our psyche, so instead of leaving past mistakes in the past and focusing on the solution, we end up with a strange mental confusion that keeps us on the same path prone to mistakes. In other words, instead of worrying about what we often ate in the restaurant, we need to think more about cooking at home.
Most often, the repetition of mistakes is reduced to the repetition of bad habits. We know that we are constantly spending a lot of money on shopping and we want to save money, we eat unhealthy food and we want to lose weight, we know that we will be late somewhere and we go out again later than planned, we have love meetings with people who do not suit us, etc.
By repeating the same mistakes, our brain creates “mistake pathways” that we make out of habit. Sometimes we blame others for our mistakes, in fact we run away from responsibility, but still we are the ones who repeat the mistake, not the others.
How can we try to avoid the mistakes of the past? How do we learn not to repeat the same mistakes over and over again? Instead of thinking about what we have done in the past, we should think about what we want to achieve in the future. So if we want to avoid what happened in the past, it’s best not to try to learn from it.
Let’s leave the past in the past, where it belongs and focus on the future.
