Now that we’re at it, I’m thinking about something else.
People often map the situation as having multiple choices, and you either win, or you learn on your mistakes. That’s not how it actually works. In reality, you learn in both cases, but the lesson you learn might actually be counterproductive.
For instance, you try something and you succeed immediately. You think it’s because it’s either easy or because you’re really competent. In essence, you can get a skewed understanding of how hard it actually is. Then, with your inflated sense of competence built on a streak of good fortune, you try something else, and you fail spectacularly. Then you reach all the wrong conclusions, because you are reluctant to admit that the initial success, which you built up your entire ego support structure over, was a complete fluke. Having learned all the wrong lessons, you make your next moves, which increase the level of disaster you are in. Eventually, if you’re stubborn enough, you are completely destroyed.
It doesn’t have to be a major issue. It might be something like buying your first used car, and you get lucky and it has no major issues, so you conclude that used cars are great and people who buy new are just stupid and it’s a waste of money. Then you buy your next used car based on your experience, and it turns to be an absolute shitbox. Your options are now to either stand there in surprise like a damn fool, or realise you were statistically too lucky with the first car, and you misunderstood the situation. It’s like running downstairs with scissors. Statistically, it’s a very bad idea, but the thing with statistics is that bad ideas usually take time to show themselves. You can do something ten times with no consequences, only to slip on the eleventh try and impale yourself on the scissors through your neck. You can then curse your bad luck, or realise that you were in fact inordinately lucky for the first ten times, and you drew all the wrong conclusions.
Similarly, I’ve seen women who have it too easy picking the ideal partner. Then they assume it’s the norm, get arrogant, ruin their relationship and then wonder how come they can never find anyone that good again.
Winning has a cost, and the cost is learning the wrong lessons from it. The Americans even have a word for it, “a winner”. A winner is a person in whose nature it is to win, and a loser is a person in whose nature is to lose. That’s what learning wrong lessons looks like. You win, and you change your self-image, imagining yourself as a winner. It changes your confidence, it changes the way you view the world and others in it. You think you won because you’re just better, and those who lost are just worse. You don’t understand that it might be a statistical fluke, and you don’t want to understand it because it ruins your very pleasant self-image. You don’t want to understand that those who lost maybe did nothing wrong, because you like feeling no obligation to help them; after all, they are the losers, and you are the winner. And then your luck changes and your entire world falls apart.
Both sides of a choice have a cost. In both cases, you experience consequences and you learn. Sometimes, failing early can make you prudent, cautious and more strategic, leading to good long-term outcomes. Sometimes, there’s nothing worse that can happen to you than winning early.