Learning for our mistakes

Day 241 / 365

When I was at school I noticed a common pattern with myself. I always used to slack off during the normal school days, always putting off learning the new things that were taught. But when it was exam time, and I was left with just a few hours to study for the paper, I used to get annoyed at myself for not putting in any effort back when I actually had loads of time.

You would think that after a few times that this happened I would’ve learned my lesson. But that was not the case. This shit happened regularly at exam time. At the time of the exam, it seemed quite obvious to me what I had been doing wrong. But later I would still repeat the same mistakes again. And I think most of you would relate to me in this. Why do we fail to learn from mistakes?

I think this is partly because our brains are extremely poor at predicting future conditions. If you don’t study now, you are probably going to have a hard time a day before the exam. If you don’t save money now, you’ll probably have a hard time in the future. If you don’t exercise now, you will not feel good physically a decade from now.

All this is true, but the issue is that it’s all set in the future. And while we are bad at predicting the future, we are experts at lying to ourselves about it. We tell ourselves, it’s fine if you be a little lazy today, you’ll make up for it later. That later never comes, and when the shit hits the fan you finally realize all that you’ve been doing wrong.

What I used to do to tackle this during my school days was just write about it. When I was too stressed about the exam and feeling disappointed in myself, I used to write all those feelings down on paper as a note to myself. Later when my state of mind was normal again, I used to go back to those notes, and they used to give me a better view of the future, and the consequences that my present actions can have.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Why there’s always room for dessert