arts and culture on Learning from Mistakes

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

Today is Yesterday's Pupil.

“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable with failure. They may not be happy about it, but instead of reacting with anger or frustration, they seem fairly intrigued by the pe...

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.

Over the years, I’ve read about many leaders who failed ethically in their leadership. Can you guess what they had in common? They all thought it could never happen to them. There was a false sense of...

We all have blind spots. We all have flaws in our personalities, behavior, or work habits that we can’t see, and they block our performance and growth. But others can see them. If we permit them to gi...

Leadership is often a matter of failing people’s expectations at a rate they can stand.

One of the fastest ways to learn a language is by immersion . This term can mean a few different things, but the basic idea in all of them is that you are exposed to that language in your social inte...

The marvellous thing about learning from a story is that a story never ends, so our learning from it need not end either. p.98.

It takes fresh experiences, surroundings, and inputs for us to see familiar shadows in a new light.

We learn to live by living together with others, and by living like them—a process which has disadvantages as well as blessings.

Suffering is a dreadful teacher but often the beginning of the best in us. Suffering and creativity arc often interdependent. Pain produces a terrible tension released in our creative response. Suffer...

In his excellent book, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World , Mike Cosper explains the value in persevering through the difficult realities of practicing solitude. ...

I should have learned by now that life never settles down for long.

The Benedictine nun Joan Chittister recounts a story she once heard by a communications professor, which she said fundamentally changed the way she thought about success and failure: A young boy was...

One of the most effective ways to learn about yourself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.

Community is when you learn I’m not everything you thought I was, and I learn you’re not everything I thought you were.

I see my past drinking as a behavioral problem, a learned response to dealing (or not dealing) with emotional pain and stress. Once I achieved the excavation of my wounds, I no longer lived with the s...

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.

Have you noticed how difficult it is to remember someone’s name when you meet them? Within seconds of a person telling me his name, I’ve forgotten what he said. I may have even repeated it to myself. ...

Stop being so sure that you are always right, and others wrong. Don't trust your own opinion, when you find it contrary to that of older men, and especially to that of your own parents. Age gives ...

The great mistake made by most of the Lord’s people is in hoping to discover in themselves that which is to be found in Christ alone.

Since the advent of widespread public education in the West, it seems that many people express dissatisfaction with their schooling more often than they share positive experiences. This makes it all t...

We want everyone around us to believe we have it all together—and we don’t. We fear everyone else is living the lives they post and we are the only imposters. And so, the race is on. The race to perfe...

O my Savior, help me. I am slow to learn, prone to forget, and weak to climb; I am in the foothills when I should be on the heights; I am pained by my graceless heart, my prayerless days, my poverty o...

The wonderful word master used to describe the person who is at the top of his or her craft, whatever the profession. It was a title that one could work toward and with some degree of confidence ascri...

The good life starts with an apology.