Trial & Error
Everyone goes through this process either on a grand or minute scale. Some people notice it and some just don’t.
- You try multiple jobs through your life
- You move colleges
- You problem solve at work via trial and error
- You go through multiple partners
- You try different sports
- You root for different teams
- You may switch your major
These are only a few examples that may or may not affect you specifically.
When you Fail
There is no “if” to a lot of things in life when it comes to failure but a matter of when. Every decision has an outcome. That outcome is either a success or a failure. Some failures are small and some are big. It all depends. We can’t define which will be small and which will be large with pinpoint accuracy because there are too many factors. We can, of course, take some pretty educated guesses.
We try to break things down into probability without noticing it.
For example…if you don’t show up for work you’re going to have repercussions at about a 100% rate. That’s a high probability. You may not get fired and rather get a warning or a point; however, you will undoubtedly have repercussions. On the other hand, if you tell a friend you’re going to play a game tonight with them and you fall asleep they may not be happy but the fallout from that decision is far less than that of skipping work.
We go through our daily lives thinking like this even if we don’t realize we do. I catch myself doing it all the time. I also catch my friends, parents, and girlfriend doing it too.
The best way to treat things is if it can result in a major life change take it very seriously and appreciate it. Things like your job, friends, partners, and much more fall into this category.
If you don’t take these things seriously you will almost always lose them very quickly.
Of course, there’s always a case to be made for the little things. In a world where everything moves so quickly around us I would like to quote Rule #32 of Zombieland which is of course: enjoy the little things.
Learn From It
The reason trial and error is such a key part of our lives is very simple; it’s because we learn from our errors. If I try to do something and fail I ’m not going to be left with anything I’m going to be left with some knowledge as a takeaway so next time I should be able to come close to success.
Humans may be creatures of habit but we aren’t inherently stupid…at least not the majority of us. Most people learn from their mistakes and understand that trial & error is not only the best way to do things but it’s the most common way to live one’s life.
- We try different foods and drinks
- We do different activities
- We try multiple hobbies
- Even live in different locations and housing types
Almost every single thing we do we do it by trial and error.
This isn’t a new observation or even a surprising one…at least it shouldn’t be for 99% of people reading this.
So Why Doesn’t Everyone Die a Millionaire?
This is a good question with a very simple answer. This is because everyone is different. Not everyone learns from their mistakes as much as the next person. While one person takes 20 things away from being fired the next guy may take one thing away and that one thing is “they’re stupid” which may in some cases be correct; however, it’s not at all a valuable lesson.
Furthermore, some people take risks and some don’t. As anyone can tell you that high risk and high reward works a lot of the time. Why? Simple, if I drop $5,000 into a new cryptocurrency…say EOS when it was around $0.60. There’s a high chance it collapses and you lose everything but there’s also a high chance that it grows quickly and you multiply your money indefinitely.
I actually invested in EOS. It went from around $0.60 to $19.20 meaning my $5,000 turned into about $145,000 in the course of 4 months. Not bad, right?
Had I held onto the currency I would have also been able to witness my $5,000 shrink back down to about $40,000 which is bad but is still far less than I could have had.
Learn from Mistakes
When you make a mistake no matter how critical or minute you should always review it. I don’t mean you should sit down and go step by step so much as looking back and asking yourself “what could I have done differently” or “how could I have produced a better outcome for that situation”. If you’ve made a critical mistake that you can actually take a moment or a period of time to unpack and learn from then do it but otherwise you should look back for a short period of time to learn from everything.
There are a lot of lessons to learn from mistakes for anyone and everyone. If you get a poor grade on a test find out why and learn from it. Obviously tests are very easy to learn from because they’re setup to be learned from. However, if you are dumped by your partner that’s a situation where you need to learn from your mistakes but finding a way to learn is a bit more difficult as there isn’t as much direction just usually raw information.
People in relationships communicate their feelings, aspirations, goals, and wants when it comes to their general life and their relationship. So it’s not like there’s nothing to learn from; in fact, I would make he argument there is more to learn from a relationship falling out or failure than any other form of relationship except maybe one with your child.
My point is even if the experience isn’t setup specifically for you to learn from like a relationship it’s still more than possible to learn from your mistakes and have extremely valuable takeaways from the experience so if nothing else you can come closer to success.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully after reading this you have a better understanding of what trial & error is and how it affects each of our lives in very impactful ways. My goal with writing this article, as always, is to share my personal ideology as well as work on my writing so let me know what you think in a response if you’d like. Also, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed!
