3 Lessons In Learning From Your Mistakes - Sanjay Raghunath

Published on 16 Jul

3 Lessons In Learning From Your Mistakes

When you are eager to achieve success, it is natural to take risks and you are sure to make a few mistakes on the way. But the most important aspect to bear in mind is to analyze the reasons for failure and learn from them, so that you do not repeat the same mistakes again.

The success graph of life is not straight, it oscillates up and down. It' s learning how to handle the ups and downs that makes us better human beings and leaders. Here are three important lessons:

Have the courage to own up a mistake

While it is common human behavior to be embarrassed about mistakes, owning up is the first step towards improvement. When you analyze mistakes and break them down into its base components, you can get unexpected insights.

Often a company' s growth and innovation are built on its mistakes—a company that can master the art of analyzing mistakes will be miles ahead of its competition.

The next time you are confronted by a major business mistake, make it a point to sit with your team to analyze it and plot the sequence of events that led to the mistake, as well as the sequence of events that could have taken the project to a successful completion. This process will also chart out an alternative path, which can overcome the faults and ultimately lead to success.

Business mistakes lead to innovation

In today's fast-moving world where technology is disrupting every facet of business, the biggest risk is not innovating and changing with the times. Innovation is all about experiments and experiments by their very nature are prone to failure.

If we build brands that are centered around innovation using teams that have the permission to experiment, we can grow brands that evolve from their mistakes and grow into gigantic success stories that spread across the world.

If a brand is not prepared to fail, it is not prepared to learn.

Learn from others mistakes

It's as important to learn from others mistakes as it is from your own. We don't have to reinvent failures. Many brands fail simply because of wrong decisions taken by their management at critical business junctures.

It is critical to know the pulse of your industry and the trends cropping up in the horizon. By keeping yourself updated with the business directions taken by top competitors and analyzing the disruptions planned by startups, you will have an accurate business map of your industry.

Often, it is easier and less stressful to learn from others mistakes rather than go through the same process and experience it first-hand. Unfortunately, learning from others is not a natural instinct in us and this needs to become a developed habit.

Brands that are actively monitoring business trends and the experiments being done in each industry are at a great advantage because of the data that they are able to collect. In the modern world where big data is valued above everything else, brands that have industry-based data and are learning from the mistakes of other brands are way ahead of the rest.