Learning

Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”

Steve Jobs

There’s a lot of truth in the old saying, “hindsight is 20/20”. Yes. That’s the way we learn. By making mistakes, looking back, seeing, understanding, and correcting going forward.

But hindsight is not perfect. It’s not completely reliable either. Why is that?

We literally experience every event in our life as colored, possibly contaminated—heavily influenced, seasoned, flavored, by our culture, friends, family beliefs, circumstances into which we’re born, and all of those were influenced by those who preceded them. There’s no such thing as perfect insight. And no such thing as a perfect person.

What to do? Learn to pivot and keep doing the best you can with what you’ve got, right where you are in this moment. That’s what!