How To Maximize Learning From Other People’s Mistakes and Failures

Your own mistakes and failures are limited, so leverage other people’s experiences

Kevin Ann
9 min readSep 29, 2019

While striving in our lives working towards success, it is inevitable that mistakes and failures will occur. To deal with them, there exist aphorisms about the proper mindset to take these mistakes and failures in stride so you can improve in a specific endeavor and in order to grow as a person.

While this is 100% true, it may be more beneficial to learn from the mistakes and failures of others.

I will consider here what types of feedback and learning can result from mistakes and failures, and how this process can be made more efficient by consider other people.

Feedback During Learning

Types of Feedback

In general, learning requires multiple trials that may involve success and failure, with each trial representing an opportunity to learn and improve. There are different types of feedback of varying frequency and quality.

  • Outcome Feedback
    This is the most coarse-grained and most frequent type of feedback and only tells you how well you did at a task.
  • Informational Feedback
    This type of…

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Kevin Ann

AI/full-stack software engineer | trader/investor/entrepreneur | physics phd