One day, I was chatting with a friend of mine who is a venture capitalist. I was talking about lessons I learned from starting this company, and how I have made mistakes that have turned out to have long-term consequences. He said, “Don’t overlearn your lessons. I don’t think you will ever run the risk of not learning your lessons, but I think you might end up overlearning them. Let’s face it. Most of my wins in this business happened when I invested right before the market run-up, and most of my losses happened when I invested as the market was going down. Therefore, these bigger market forces affect the outcome a lot more than you think they do, and are entirely out of your control.”
There are people who never take responsibility for anything that has gone wrong. They always point to a lot of reasons on why it is “not their fault”. Those people will never learn for sure, as they always think it is someone else’s fault, or it is just bad luck. On the other hand, there are people at the other end of the extreme, who always look at ways they could have done better. I belong to this latter category, as I believe that the right attitude to have and the right mentality to maintain is one of constant self-evaluation.
Hearing my friend’s advice on not overlearning my lessons has made me pause to think for a while. Is it possible that in my constant pursuit of self-improvement, I have actually NOT learned the one area that needs the most learning – i.e. gaining perspective and mature perception of the world and life as they are and will be – imperfect and problematic, with mistakes, germs, viruses, illnesses, accidents and even some tragic events, but nonetheless interesting and joyful. My laser-sharp focus on learning lessons from mistakes so that I do not make them again makes me a perfectionist, as my implicit goal is to not make mistakes in the future. That, of course, will not lead to an infallible person. Instead, it will result in a highly dissatisfied person, as he/she makes more mistakes as time goes by.
In fact, overlearning our lessons is learning the wrong lesson. For example, if I do not recognize that the macroeconomic environment affects the future of any startup companies, I will end up dwelling on some harmless mistakes of mine, thinking that I must not repeat those mistakes in the future. And that carries an implicit learning that as long as I do not repeat those mistakes, everything will be fine, which completely ignores the importance of the external environment. Of course, it is entirely possible that if I had not made those mistakes, the outcome would have been a little better. But thinking that things will turn out perfectly if I do everything perfectly is hugely naïve, and is absolutely the “wrong” lesson to learn.
There is a Chinese saying that says, “ it is easier to move a mountain than to change a person’s personality.” Therefore, perhaps I should not attempt to change my own personality as yet another self-improvement initiative. However, that does not imply that I ought to take a resigned attitude towards things that I can change. As my own personality tends to “overlearn” lessons, perhaps one area where I should “learn my lesson” is to not learn/think too much about learning lessons, and not to attribute any negative events or outcomes to mistakes, as many things are indeed out of our control. Instead, every time I make a mistake, I should simply stop at “not making this mistake again”, instead of beating myself up for making mistakes in general. Overlearning my lessons has perhaps prevented me from realizing that life can go on with a lot of mistakes. In fact, if one is so focused on not making mistakes in all the categories big and small, she is going to be spread so thin mentally and physically that she will end up making mistakes in the biggest category of all – to live and to let live.
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