The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Heard - You Never Learn From Your Successes

I’m really getting tired of hearing people say how much they learn from their failures and they don’t learn from their successes.

No. Don’t believe it. You DO learn from your successes. And you DO become successful by remembering them.

The first line of my popular post 8+ Ways To Train Yourself To Be Creative which landed me smack dab on the front page of del.icio.us was:

To be creative, you have to first believe you are creative.

To parallel that, I’d like to say:

Success breeds Success.

Personally, many times I learn nearly just as much from both my successes and my failures. My ways to train yourself to be creative article ended up getting the recognition I wish all my articles could get. Don’t even begin to think I didn’t go back and take a look at my article.

What was the first line? It must have captured attention. How?

How did I end the post? How did I organize the headlines? What kind of story did I tell and how was it captivating?

What’s that I’m telling myself? I don’t know the answer to some of those questions I ask myself? No problem. I can just ask readers what they thought.

Just Do It

So go ahead. It’s ok. Learn from your successes and remember them. It’s important to remember your successes because like I said, success breeds success.

And after you learn from those pesky failures forget about them. The only thing you should take with you at that point is remembering the successful attempt. Remembering your failure and dwelling on it does nothing for you.

Train yourself to mentally see the positive side of things.

Learn and remember from those wonderful successes.

I’d love to hear some comments below. What do you think about this? Also, if you think this article could be helpful to someone, please forward it to them.

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9 Responses to “The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Heard - You Never Learn From Your Successes”

RLD: Taekwondo Happiness
on 03 Mar 2008 at 10:12 am #

Great advice - I don’t know why successes are so underrated, but we should certainly take note of when we hit the nail on the head.

RLD: Taekwondo Happiness’s last blog post..Invincibility

John Hoff
on 03 Mar 2008 at 5:39 pm #

Yeah, they are underrated, aren’t they. It’s kind of like positive thinking. If you always think positively, you’ll probably be a happier person and approach problems in a different way.

Kelly @ Small Business Guru
on 04 Mar 2008 at 5:27 am #

John,
Yeah - I put a lot of value in learning from my mistakes.

But when you can learn from your success — now that’s some powerful stuff.
So why don’t we do that more often? Well - I think in large part you called it out right there.

You had a glaring, wonderful success — and instead of saying, ‘yeah, i’m pretty dang awesome.’ You stepped back and asked questions. The same type of questions you’d ask if you failed.

Why, why, why….you forced yourself to learn from it. Many of us don’t have that discipline so we miss out on the momentum that can be built from incremental success.

We reactively ask those questions when we fail. If we can get in the habit of doing that when we succeed, we’ll really get ready to take off.

Kelly @ Small Business Guru’s last blog post..Can a great idea and some hard work take an entrepreneur from $0 to $100k in one year?

John Hoff
on 05 Mar 2008 at 4:50 pm #

Kelly - I think the really successful people like Donald Trump are curious about everything. They ask why in just about every situation.

Like you, I put a lot of value in learning from my mistakes. They teach us a lot. But if people forget to evaluate their successes they may be missing out not on what created a failure, but what created a success.

Who wouldn’t want that insight? Is it always there? Perhaps not. But the curious seem to have a better batting average than those that are not.

What was that Alanis Moressette song, “Learn.” I loved that song.

Cath Lawson
on 06 Mar 2008 at 1:10 am #

Hi John - “Success Breeds Success” really stood out and it’s true. I think people do learn from their successes, but it’s more of a natural thing, sort of like riding a bike. Once you learn how to do something well, you do it subconsciously.

Mistakes are different, we have to analyse them - see what went wrong and work out what we can do to prevent the same thing happening in the future.

Cath Lawson’s last blog post..Business Success Is Only A Deathbed Away

John Hoff
on 06 Mar 2008 at 3:16 am #

Hey Catherine. I tell people who want to be successful but lack some drive to try and find and maybe work with someone successful. That great energy successful people have can rub off quite easily if you let it.

Yeah, the challenge with mistakes is finding what went wrong and not only what we can do to prevent them from happening again, but also how we can improve upon them and make them win . . . which is pretty much what you are saying

I think maybe the more experienced you are the more natural learning comes to you. However, every time I succeed in something my natural reaction is to do a quick analysis of it. It’s just what I do.

By the way, I want to thank you. I accredit much of the popularity of my 8+ Ways To Train Yourself To Be Creative post’s popularity to you. I think you stumbled it and a few days later it took off. So thanks!

Michael Dunlop
on 19 Mar 2008 at 3:54 am #

Hey John,

Great post, I guess sometimes its an excuse, “To make money you need money”.

Michael

John Hoff
on 19 Mar 2008 at 11:58 am #

Hey Michael - thanks!

I wish I could reword that to, “To make money, it’s easier if you already have money.” - a lot easier!

Love your site, by the way.