Why we should learn from failures, not just successes

What do you guys think about this? The whole idea of ignoring the advice of people who have tried hard but still ended up failing, or those who were once rich but blew it all due to some bad choices they made. Instead of just following the usual advice that says to listen to successful people, why not also pay attention to those who have failed? Learning from both sides could actually help us find a more reliable way to achieve financial success. Hearing about the mistakes that led to their downfall could be really valuable. Just because they don’t have money now doesn’t mean their experiences aren’t worth considering. You might learn in just a few minutes what they took years to figure out through their failures. I got this idea from a short video I watched and thought it was worth sharing.

You know the saying OP, that no one is a monopoly of knowledge, I believe that the same thing goes for information too because it’s from information we gain knowledge. So, everyone has one or two things to teach or contribute to others in order to help them make better choice, regardless of their present or past financial status. Even those who have been poor and are still poor or somewhere around the middle class still have things to teach others.

I think every person on earth has a piece of advice that can help you. It is important to listen to everyone. Ranking people by their financial status, education, age or wealth is a good estimation of that person probably having useful advice for you but it is not a certainty. How many billionaires exist in this world simply by being born and never experiencing real life, work or having to study anything because they were so sheltered by their families fortune?

Unfortunately, life does not always have a happy ending. A lot of us are scared that we will not end up successful and the truth is only a small percentage actually makes it in life. While the rest have to make do with what they have. This can work only if you are mature enough to observe what other people’s mistakes are and know to never repeat the same ones. Some unsuccessful person knows what he has done wrong but until now remains to be ignorant. They remain to be unmotivated. If you can observe these behaviors without the direct source having to tell you specifically then you can definitely learn.

Of course there's no one without a good piece of advice to give out but there are some persons who have this naive attitude of only wanting to take lecture about business growth from people that they see are presently established. Measuring the importance of the source of advice by the echelon of the individual is really inappropriate though because not every rich guy can have the wealth of experience to give advice about how to building business or wealth, because they inherited a silverware empire without even knowing the history of it development.

It is good to take advice from both sides especially from those that have tried and have failed and those that have one times succeeded also at one point, this will guide you on best choice to take as you will be well informed of the consequences of every action that you are to take. However succeeding in an endeavor is not really about too much of good plans you have, because you can still have all the plans that you feel will propel you to success and at the end of the day, it might boomerang to be something different, so at some point you still need a bit of luck and goodwill to succeed, so the best way to manage success most times is to know how to manage crisis because you can easily see them on the long run as your doing your business or in your investment, hence you can manage your crisis properly, it will reduce your failure rate.

There is such a concept as “survivorship bias”. The essence of systematic survivorship bias is a type of selection error, when there is a lot of information on one group of objects (“survivors”) and almost no information on the other (“dead”). As a result, we take into account only part of the information, ignoring the opposite but existing cases. The same is true for success/failure in business, for example, most people study successful cases, but absolutely do not study even more unsuccessful businesses and the reasons for their collapse. Think for yourself - you probably know many orders of magnitude more positive stories than negative ones. This means we are missing out on the experience that can be called “why the problems occurred”

Learning shouldn't be based on conditions, it's a never ending process and one should try and learn from everyone and everything, you learn from the experiences of others and whether the experiences had a good or bad ending doesn't matter because your mind should be bold enough to differentiate what you should pick and what you should leave behind, and if you aren't able to do that, I'm sorry to say this but you will barely become successful in life. People who tried their best but couldn't make it might sometimes have more knowledge to give you than the ones who have made it without much struggle, because as it is said, the number of times that you fail in trying to achieve something will give you that many ways that don't successfully work, and that's necessary knowledge. Those who have achieved success can give you tips and knowledge about the ways that work, however, I believe that every person should make their own way. The odds for you to become successful by following another person's exact path will mostly be very tiny.

I would have said there is no point learning from someone who had riches before but lost it because he was not able to sustain it. And I felt what is needed to learn from such person is the reason for losing it or the mistake that was made, as they say it is a wise person that learns from someone's mistake. However, on a closer thought, such person is even the most qualified to learn and ask questions from because he was there before so to know how he was able to get there in the first place can help you claim too and also instead of asking that rich person who is still sustaining the wealth how not to fail, it is better to ask the person who failed about the regretable mistakes made that caused the downfall, of course he would have more stories to tell that you can avoid.

We can learn from anyone who fails or succeeds and learning is not the same as copying what they do but paying attention to the causes of their failure and not repeat their mistakes also their success and doing what we have learned in our own way.

very few people archive to learn from positive happenings to others. Humans learn thru consequences, We fall, we get up again.

Well said here. But what the OP might be contrary to what you have in mind. Learning from failures doesn't mean that you have to learn from someone who has failed in life. It actually means that you learn from the stories that led to their success. If you notice in life there is always a success story and a failure story. There must be challenges that everyone face in life before they get where they are going and those are the experience we can learn from whether it is personal or from someone will know. I even got to understand that most successful people cook up stories to please the hearing of others. Anyone might be mislead if they are they tell them these story so at times we get to learn from the experiences we see in life added with the one we see from others.

I think it's generally millionaires who inherit money or receive it through some kind of luck like a lottery win that lose money, but of course there will be a tiny portion that earned it then hit a string of bad choices. When you have earned the money, it is mostly through hard work and shrewd decisions which lead you to accumulating it over time. You see the money grow by investing in the right places with a lot of errors. To put together that much money, you've likely got a grip on your finances and are not overly wasteful when it comes to spending money. You've probably got money in investments which after a certain amount become self sustaining and contribute towards your lifestyle, making it hard to fall back down the rungs unless you massively overspend.

Learning for the mistakes of others could be hard since your situations and theirs are not the same and also, what makes them failed could be somewhat non existence in your own case, although one can learn few lessons from the mistakes of others but still such learning can't be rested on as a good source of lessons since the real lessons comes from personal experiences If such people have any lessons to learn from, they won't be broke today, I get amm before is not a property and as long as they could not sustain the they financial freedom when they hard that opportunity shows that they are already a failure. Not all mistakes are good lessons to learn from, most mistakes that brought success people down are always self afflicted and at such one can easily avoid those self afflicting situations if you choose to be discipline on your own, in reality what I am saying is that failure and success goes hand in hand and learning them from others could be harmful if anything goes wrong along the line, but if you build your financial experience based on your individual past mistakes you will absorb the lesson so well.

I think we are just saying the same thing mate. Like I said earlier, everyone has something to offer, something they’ve either learned on their own or from others, (I believe you said that too) and these stories or lessons, when we put them together, could show us a totally different perspective of life, which if applied also could potentially give a different result too.  Yeah in life, there are always two sides of the coin, there’s the success and failure stories and we sure do need these both sides to help us in our journey or quest to achieving success. The success stories motivates us to work either harder or smarter while the failure stories are there to guide us towards avoiding certain mistakes that would’ve given us an easy route to failure. So basically, we need them both, even if it’s important to have or gain our own experiences too as we advance, we could really use that extra boost/motivation as well as the guide too to help us effectively navigate the challenges we encounter.

Now my question, after you learn from the failures from both unsuccessful and successful people, will you become successful? Someone else mistake who makes them bankrupt isn't always a mistake for other people. Let's say the successful people will give you advice "make sure you've make research and calculated everything before you take action". While the unsuccessful people will give you advice "just take action, don't over complicate your life by making too much research and calculation, I missed the golden opportunity just because I was too careful."

Learning from failure is one of the most valuable experiences it helps us understand our mistakes and avoid them in the future failure gives us an opportunity to identify our weaknesses and strengthen them. All we need to remember is that the same mistakes that led to our failure should not be repeated. We can learn from listening to the reasons for failure of people who have lost wealth. Successful people share their experiences and knowledge when they lose wealth which helps us learn and improve. Their advice and guidance can lead us in the right direction.

If you want to success, you should learn from both successful and not yet success people because there is something lesson that you can get from them. You can have more knowledge and experience from those people that will useful for you so you can analyze deeper from their lesson. You need to learn many things so you must gain the knowledge from many sources including those who are not yet success because you can learn from their lesson and also mistake and you will know how to prevent the mistake. The more lesson you can get from those people, the more you will see that you have more knowledge and you can make your plan to achieve what you want. We never know from where we can success and from what lesson we can achieve our goal so getting as much good knowledge will be useful for us to learn more things.

of course by studying various things about knowledge of course it will bring us closer to success, because everyone has certainly been given the gift of the advantages and disadvantages that they have, by learning a lot from successful people at least we know how they improve their standard of living and can be used for us to continue to learn from them so that our knowledge will increase to achieve our desires.

One thing about learning from people that has been at the top and have failed is that something that took them years to learn, you can get the knowledge for free just for a day or two, and the most important thing is not repeating that trait that makes them fail. Any wise people in this our present generation will listen to those that have been at the top, but are nothing to write home about today, those that are still at the top and have stayed their still date, they both have something educative to tell you because by doing so, you will know the reason why those that have been at the top failed, and you wouldn't have to repeat such mistake, while those that have been at the top and are still there, you will learn from them on how they manage their success and how they didn't let it get into their head, and all that they did to stay at the top, because it's even more difficult to stay at the top than getting to the top, so learning from a failure and a successful person is the key to being successful during a lifetime, not just from one side. Another set's of people that an individual needs to learn from are those sets of people that have failed over and over again in their field, while trying to get to the top but they refuses to give up, they are as powerful in experience and knowledge as the two sets of people that I have mentioned above.