Why “Learn From Your Mistakes” Is Bad Advice
Mark Manson and Drew Bernie argue that "learn from your mistakes" is too simple. Different failures need different responses, only some teach you much, and quitting is often the smarter move.
The gist
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Manson recounts Amy Edmondson's finding that top hospital teams reported more errors because they felt safe to, which led to her idea of psychological safety.
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Bernie explains Edmondson's three failure types: fix basic ones with checklists, fix complex ones with better systems, and seek small, intelligent experiments.
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Bernie cites a 2010 study: repeat founders who succeeded hit 30%, first-timers 21%, and founders who had failed only 22%.
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Bernie says learning from failure depends on dosage, recovery, survivability and extraction, citing an 85% rule where a 15% error rate teaches most.
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Manson suggests running a premortem before projects, and loss framing afterward by listing costs like money or hours, so failures feel less catastrophic.
Mark Manson uses it
"Tim Ferriss has a heuristic around decision-making that is kind of similar to this where he says that when choosing what to try to do, ask yourself which failure produces the most information. I've ended up running these through a lot of my own decisions."
▶ Play at 8:16
Mark Manson recommends it
"One is called loss framing, which is take whatever you lost from the failure and actually quantify it. If you actually sit down with the spreadsheet and calculate, okay, what did I actually miss out on here? Oh, it was like 500 bucks and like 12 hours of my life. You're like, ..."
▶ Play at 19:44What they recommend · 2 picks
"One is called loss framing, which is take whatever you lost from the failure and actually quantify it. If you actually sit down with the spreadsheet and calculate, okay, what di..."
"Tim Ferriss has a heuristic around decision-making that is kind of similar to this where he says that when choosing what to try to do, ask yourself which failure produces the mo..."
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