Mistakes are the currency of success

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

The people most comfortable making mistakes and learning from them are the ones who do the best in life:

Here’s an excerpt from Principles, a brilliant (and freely available) manifesto of Dalio’s rules for life and business:

…the popular picture of success—which is like a glossy photo of an ideal man or woman out of a Ralph Lauren catalog, with a bio attached listing all of their accomplishments like going to the best prep schools and an Ivy League college, and getting all the answers right on tests—is an inaccurate picture of the typical successful person.

Instead, Dalio noticed that truly successful people have an interesting sort of humility:

Great people become great by looking at their mistakes and weaknesses and figuring out how to get around them. So I learned that the people who make the most of the process of encountering reality, especially the painful obstacles, learn the most and get what they want faster than people who do not. I learned that they are the great ones—the ones I wanted to have around me.

And from Soros:

“On a personal level, I am a very critical person who looks for defects in myself as well as in others. But, being so critical, I am also quite forgiving. I couldn’t recognize my mistakes if I couldn’t forgive myself. To others, being wrong is a source of shame; to me, recognizing my mistakes is a source of pride. Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.” (From Soros on Soros)

and:

“There’s no way that you can live an adequate life without many mistakes. In fact, one trick in life is to get so you can handle mistakes. Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke.” (From Tao of Charlie Munger)

Post external references

  1. 1
    https://qz.com/1016992/george-soros-ray-dalio-and-charlie-munger-three-of-the-worlds-most-powerful-billionaires-agree-theres-one-trait-you-need-to-succeed/
Source