We all know Nelson Mandela’s famous quote:
„I never lose. I either win or I learn.“ (Nelson Mandela)
Few people realize that it actually introduces a quite tricky problem. Most people assume, that it is always best to try to win. Then, in case you didn’t, you can still learn something. Therefore they read Mandela’s quote only as a consolation for the (hopefully rare) case one loses.
I’ll try to show in this blog post, that it’s actually far more complicated: often it’s much more important to learn than to win.
How can this be?
The reason is the Matthew principle. It says, applied to knowledge, that the knowledge you already have determines the speed at which you are able to learn.
This means that learning is not a linear but an exponential process. To learn early ist therefore of huge importance, because it helps to learn faster in the future. Or in other words, knowledge acquired early is much more valuable than knowledge acquired later.
Let’s look at some timeless masterpieces of art. The 1984 movie „Dune“, directed by David Lynch, is considered a cult movie today and is still unmatched. Several other screen adaptations which tried to „improve“ on „Dune“ failed miserably (in spite of huge technical advances since 1984).
But when it was released it was mostly considered a failure. And yes, even if the movie is better than any other adaptation, it still fails to convey many qualities of the book.
Therefore we could call the movie a „grand, spectacular failure“. Many famous pieces of art were, at the time they were revealed, considered as „grand, spectacular failures“.
How comes, that this happens so often? That even our greatest artists „fail“ so often? Why don’t they „aim a bit lower“, which would allow them to succeed completely?
Because if they would have done this in the past, they would not have learned enough to become the masters they are today. The only way to become really good at something is to constantly „aim too high“ and, to some extent, also most probably fail. Therefore the „grand, spectacular failures“ are not exceptions for great artists but a result of their general practice / strategy.
This is not an easy path, because each failure challenges our self-esteem. To be able to fail again and again is a luxury only few can afford. Most people believe that famous people are self-confident because they are famous now. But this is not true, it’s the other way round: a strong self-esteem allowed them to fail often (i.e. learn a lot!) and become inevitably famous with time.
But there are other problems with „having success early“. Success means reaching your goals. The problem is that these goals change with experience. As a teenager I wanted to become a rock star and later a chemical scientist [1]. But I’m very happy with what I’m now. I had so many stupid goals in my life and I’m really happy I did not reach any of them.
Therefore, goals which require long time efforts to reach, are always tricky. You need to be flexible enough to abandon them, even if you have already invested a lot of time into trying to reach them. Otherwise you might invest too much energy into reaching a goal („success!“) which does not mean anything to you anymore.
Why do goals change with experience? Apart from the simple reason that you don’t understand enough in the beginning, there are more fundamental reasons for this:
- We are not able to foresee what we will like in the future. Our brain simply lacks this kind of introspective capabilities for reasons of biological evolution: they were never required (read my earlier blog post about this)
- Sometimes life experience is required to understand why certain activities/goals make sense. I realized that I only enjoyed to take care of my old father, because I could experience raising a kid myself before (and consequently understand what he did for me).
Therefore our goals are actually moving targets: with everything we learn, our goals shift a bit.
In a time, where people get older and older, it’s becoming increasingly unclear what our final goals are. „I want to become a lawyer“ is not good enough anymore. The longer we live, the more learning itself (and consequently failing often) becomes an important goal to pursue. It is, of course, only an instrumental goal. But probably by far the most important one.
It’s much harder to hit a running boar compared to a standing practice target. But is it a good idea to make hitting the standing target your final goal? Will you be able eat it for dinner? (just me)
[1] These were poor goals for me, which does not mean that they can't be perfect goals for someone else.
Image made with Gemini-AI (@Google: why are you so stingy? This is 1985 Atari ST quality/resolution!)
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