Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most people, when they make a mistake, either beat themselves up or quickly move on and try to forget about it. But neither of these responses is optimal. The most effective approach is to sit with the discomfort of a mistake long enough to extract its lessons, but not so long that you become mired in self-criticism.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think we know how to learn from our mistakes. We tell ourselves we'll do better next time, or we replay the failure in our minds, hoping the sting of embarrassment will motivate us to change. But research suggests these common responses are often the least effective ways to grow from our errors — and in some cases, they can actually make things worse.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

We don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience. If you have a really challenging experience and you just move on, you're not going to get any wiser. You need to actually stop and reflect on what happened.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most people think of mistakes as unfortunate detours on the path to success. But researcher Karen Sokal-Gutierrez has found that the relationship between error and learning is more intimate than that — that mistakes aren't just inevitable, they're essential. Without them, we don't just learn more slowly; in some ways, we don't learn at all.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think the best response to failure is to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and try again. But researchers have found that this intuition is often wrong. What matters more is not the trying again, but the thinking — specifically, the kind of thinking we do about our mistakes before we make our next attempt.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think we know how to learn from our mistakes. We feel bad about them, we try to understand what went wrong, and we vow to do better. But researchers who study the science of errors say that what we think helps us learn from our mistakes often doesn't work — and some of the things we think are unhelpful actually do work.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think we learn from our mistakes, but researchers have found that people often fail to extract useful lessons from their failures. Instead, we focus on the pain of the mistake itself, and quickly move on — which means we're doomed to repeat it.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think we learn from our mistakes, but the research suggests something more complicated: we often remember our mistakes in ways that are distorted, and we frequently draw the wrong lessons from them. We tell ourselves stories about what went wrong that protect our egos, and those stories can lead us to repeat the same errors.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think of mistakes as something to be ashamed of, to be hidden or forgotten as quickly as possible. But researchers who study learning and performance have found that this instinct can be deeply counterproductive. The errors we most want to forget are often the ones with the most to teach us.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think about mistakes the way we think about embarrassing moments — we want to put them behind us as quickly as possible. But researchers who study learning say this is precisely the wrong approach. The moments just after making a mistake, it turns out, are among the most powerful opportunities for the brain to encode new information.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most of us think of failure as something to move past as quickly as possible — something to hide or explain away. But researchers have found that the people who benefit most from their mistakes are those who do the opposite: they slow down, sit with the discomfort, and try to understand exactly what went wrong and why.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

When you're learning, or trying new things, you're going to make mistakes. The trick is to try to fail in a way that gives you useful information.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

Most people think the best response to a mistake is to move on quickly — to put it behind them and not dwell on it. But research suggests that this instinct can actually prevent us from learning. The most effective way to learn from failure isn't to forget it — it's to engage with it carefully and deliberately.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

We have a very egocentric view of our mistakes. We're thinking about how does this reflect on me, how does it make me look. And I think when we do that, we actually lose an opportunity to be curious about the mistake, to learn from the mistake, to understand what really went wrong.

It's Been a Minute

Feeling stuck? Take a side quest.

Adults spend so much time in environments where they're trying to control the outcome that play as a practice becomes about not knowing, not having an attachment to what the outcome is. Side quests release us from worrying about the outcome. Learning begins with inquiry. In fact, the word quest comes from the root question or inquiry.

Book of the Day

What to read this summer, according to our NPR colleagues

A lot of the non-fiction on this list takes big intimidating subjects and makes them more approachable, like good non-fiction often does.

TED

How to Build a Career You Actually Love | Bill Gurley | TED

Obsessive and continuous learning is not an input -- it's an output. It's not the cause, it's the effect.

TED

Can Play Change the World? | Play@TED Full Event | TED, the LEGO Group and the LEGO Foundation

We've reduced play to be this cherry on top of an already good life. But from a scientific perspective, it is much more fundamental than that. Play is what happens anytime we choose to do something without knowing exactly where it's going to end up.

TED

Why the Best Ideas Come from Play | Maxwell Pearce | TED

Play is the most important ingredient in every person and every industry's evolution.

Hidden Brain

Who Are You, Really?

For many of us, forgetting a name or losing your keys feels like a small failure. But what if forgetting is actually one of the most important things your brain does?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475]

I've always thought of myself as a learning machine. The moment I think I know everything or I've seen everything or I've experienced everything, I become a worse investor. The best investors I know are voraciously curious and are always trying to update their models and their thinking.

TED

Mark Rober’s $60 Million Science Experiment | TED

I can't teach you if I don't have your attention. But if I can get your attention with something remarkable, well, now I suddenly have something to attach the learning to.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dan Loeb - Lessons from 30 Years of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.475]

What I find most interesting about Dan is how much his approach has evolved across thirty years.

The a16z Show

Vitalik Buterin on Human Agency in the AI Era

actively learning and thinking for yourself may become even more important as AI capabilities improve

Office Hours

What to Do if AI Comes for Your Job, ft. LinkedIn’s Aneesh Raman | Office Hours

Old math isn't going to work for the new equations coming to work. You're going to have to start over a bit, redefine yourself, learn again, push yourself, get uncomfortable.

The Business of Tech

How AI is transforming the classroom, with Nadim Nsouli

It's a move really from the education a lot of us were familiar with, which was everyone sitting on the mat learning together, progressing as one, to actually adapting to the strengths and weaknesses of an individual student.

The a16z Show

What's Missing Between LLMs and AGI - Vishal Misra & Martin Casado

what's actually required for AGI: the ability to keep learning after training and the move from pattern matching to understanding cause and effect.

Book of the Day

In new memoir, Gavin Newsom reflects on his political rise | NPR's Book of the Day

I'm just offering a glimpse of some of the things that people may not see, of sweaty hands, of anxiety, insecurity, of trying to be someone I'm not, of making mistakes, learning from those mistakes.