It's so easy to get excited about concepts such as bouncing back from failure, learning from mistakes and not giving up. But at the end of the day, when we look back, there are probably more times we didn't learn from our mistakes than when we did; we're just a lot more likely to remember the times we grew and learnt from specific situations, especially when we're retelling it to someone else later on, supposedly as a more learned and wiser person.
Not many people are going to look back and say, I went through this situation, and I didn't learn from it at all. They are going to say things like, I went through this difficult circumstance and I didn't know it at the time but it has given me this skill, this inner strength, this capacity to handle more...
At the end of the day, human beings just want to validate their lives whether to those around them, to God, or most of all, to themselves. They need to justify why they do things, react in certain ways, make critical decisions, and they need to be at peace with them.
In a way, this process of validation can actually prevent people from learning from their mistakes because it can take a long time to admit it was a mistake in the first place since it invalidates your original decision and action as having less worth than you originally thought.
And admitting this is usually very painful.
So many people go deeper into their mistake, allowing future choices and actions to continue trying to validate that original flawed decision. And like a gambler, not willing to face the fact that the money lost no longer belongs to him or her, ups the stakes instead of resetting the strategy to the current position. Not coming to terms with the consequences of a wrong move, the person continues down a spiral of irrationality allowing the sunk cost to drive the decisions.
Some people need to hit rock bottom before they are forced to come to terms. Some don't.
The first step of true learning is humility.
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