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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 feedback is of higher quality since it not only tells you how well you did, but also provides an additional level of granularity as to what you did wrong. - Corrective Feedback
This is the highest quality but the most infrequent type of feedback since it also goes into the next step of telling you exactly how to fix it any mistakes or failures.
In an ideal world, we get immediate, specific, and actionable feedback that we know how to use to learn. Unfortunately, learning tasks in the real world may give us very amorphous and unclear feedback that may not just fail to teach us, but may actually teach us the wrong things.
Let’s consider these three types of feedback in a specific case of a beginner learning how to play poker, which is a cleaner and more sanitized version of the real world. The examples I use will be drawn from No Limit Texas Hold’em Poker, which is one of those popular variants of poker.
