“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.” —Will Rogers

Few things deplete hope as much as making mistakes, especially when they’re repeated. We’re likely to repeat them if we allow the pain of mistakes to mask their contributions to success. In fact, we can learn more from mistakes than successes. Success in love and work requires a certain amount of luck, from which we learn little.

The brain negotiates the environment in a kind of estimation-error-correction algorithm. Toddlers learn to walk by falling. Baseball players learn to hit by striking out; and if they fail only two out of three times, they’ll make the Hall of Fame. A paradigm of human learning is pitching horseshoes. The first pitch is likely to be too long or too short. The second will overcompensate. The third pitch is likely to come closest to a ringer. If we regard this as two failures and one success, our lives will be hard.........

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