When I was a child, I used to be so impressed with the wisdom that my parents and adults their age seemed to have in general. I used to believe that they knew what to do and how to do everything and always knew best.

Although I still believe that they are very wise people, I have come to understand that wisdom comes with experience. More often than not, it comes from bad experiences. I remember a saying which goes, “We learn to make the right decisions based on experience and we get experience from bad decisions.”

Anyways, this is what I was thinking about today and this is something that I have always noticed around me. We as kids thought adults just “knew” what they were doing and now that I am grown up, I realize that, that is completely not true whatsoever. In fact, we are all living lives in a “trial and error” manner.

It’s All Trial and Error

In school, we were taught about this ‘trial and error’ method in our mathematics class where we used to test out different set of parameters until we stumbled upon the solution. It seems that is the default mode of operation of most adults.

It is true that there is no blueprint to life and so nobody knows exactly what to do or who to talk to, how to behave and so on. In fact, some of the most important things in life are not even taught in schools, which is ironical because school is the place where we all go to ‘learn’ and grow as human beings from children to adults.

But when you come to the real world, you realize that most of the times, you really don’t know what you are doing and so you either you have to ask around or make mistakes until you learn for yourself. Most of the times it is the latter.

That has also been how we as a race have advanced too. We tried out several things and stuck with ways that work and discarded the ones that didn’t.

Learn From Your Mistakes

So, when we have established that life indeed works on a trial and error method, it is confirmed that mistakes will be made. That is just how it works and will always work. So, what can we humans do?

Well, learn from your mistakes and try not to repeat them. I think it was Thomas Edison who said, when asked about his thousand failures before finally inventing the light bulb, “I haven’t failed a thousand times, I have discovered thousand ways it cannot be done.”

Every mistake is a lesson on its own and thankfully we make them on a daily basis. Some of them are really small and some of the are really huge, but we learn nonetheless. And I am glad that we do, because what meaning would our lives have if we didn’t learn. Isn’t that who we are as a species?

So, I encourage you to make mistakes and make a lot of them, as ridiculous as that may sound, in the hopes that we will all grow and learn from each other.