Leveraging memories for growth (Part One)

Most of us will agree that we learn from our biggest mistakes and part of the wisdom we gain from them is to make sure not to repeat them again. This said, if we take the time and effort to “scan” our memories for all of our misguided moves or other errors we still remember, we should be able to inure the same benefits and add them to our quiver, without being sucked into the nostalgia trap, right?

I happen to believe that this basic proposition is quite sound. If a painful mistake can teach us something, we should be smart enough in learning from it so we won’t ever have to repeat the mistake again. Since we have decades of accumulated experience sitting in our memories, why not deliberately mine it? 

Sure, we need to remember an important caveat in that our memory isn't a video archive and its contents are not always totally objective recordings. They are reconstructions as with time, we tend to soften some things, exaggerate others, forget our own motivations, and sometimes rewrite ourselves as the hero—or the victim—of the story. 

As a result of that consideration, a useful "memory scan" shouldn't ask simply “What did I do wrong?” but should go deeper and more specifically, 

• What decisions did I make that turned out badly? 
• What did I fail to see at the time? 
• What warning signs did I ignore? 
• What assumption proved to be wrong? 
• What did I do repeatedly despite already knowing better? 
• What did I not do that I should have? 
• What did I learn from the experience that I subsequently forgot? 

Plus I leave one last question at the very end, “Are there patterns connecting several apparently unrelated mistakes?” That last question may be the most valuable as it can be the most actionable. One mistake is an anecdote but a recurring pattern of what leads to mistakes constitutes some serious information. 

As I mentioned above, in my "quiver" metaphor, life gives us a quiver of arrows, but we tend to think of the arrows as our successes—skills, accomplishments, good decisions or experiences. Yet, it’s fair to say that our mistakes belong in that same quiver too! 

So in the next blog we’ll take a look at these bad arrows and see how we can turn them into positive experiences that will add to our wisdom…