Learning by failing

Learning by failing is both a discipline and a philosophy of learning from ones own mistakes and failures. People who follow this system of learning believe that failure must be experienced personally to benefit fully from learning, and that influences, such as studying other people's failures, have a long lasting adverse effect on the ability to learn. One concern is that influences can lead to making uninformed assumptions and decisions. As such, learning by failing encourages doing things yourself.

The basic principals or philosophy of learning by failing are:

• Failing is not bad, it is an opportunity for personal growth and learning.
• Learning cannot begin until you fail.
• Learning cannot begin until you learn to fail.
• Failing first teaches you what you don't know and then helps you learn.
• Anything that has been done was once considered impossible because of failing.

Quotes to learn by

• I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. --Thomas Edison
• There is no failure except in no longer trying. --Elbert Hubbard
• Try again. Fail again. Fail better. --Samuel Beckett
• Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. --Henry Ford
• A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience. --Elbert Hubbard
• Supposing you have tried and failed again and again. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down. --Mary Pickford
• There is no failure. Only feedback. --Robert Allen
• Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure. --Kenneth Boudling
• It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all. --Edward de Bono
• Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. --John Dewey
• Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. --Albert Einstein
• The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process. -- Dr. Joyce Brothers

Related topics

• Unschooling

Suggested readings

• Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success, a book by John C. Maxwell

Related resources

• The Hindu: Learning from failure
• Think For A Change: Failure Is About Learning...And Learning Is About Failure
• Paula Scher on Failure | Psychology Today Blogs
• Servant of Chaos: The Fail First Strategy
• How to Fail At Practically Anything - Stepcase Lifehack
• Failing well
• Accident analysis