Learning From Our Mistakes

 As you begin to take action toward the fulfillment of your goals and dreams, you must realize that not every action will be perfect. Not every action will produce the desired result. Not every action will work. Making mistakes, getting it almost right, and experimenting to see what happens are all part of the process of eventually getting it right.
-- Jack Canfield

Ali has a great post on the benefits of learning from our mistakes:

I ran my first experiment today. I've helped run countless experiments in the past, but this was the first time I decided on the minutiae of instructions, environment, and choice and implementation of institutions.

Nothing went right, from the preparations (major underestimation of the trickiness of the institutions), to the preparation of the instructions and handouts (too fiddly, i.e. time-consuming and error-prone)... And I had no clear idea of how to record and analyze the data.

...something strange happened: there, amidst the rubble of my auction, I realized that I had probably actually learned more from the mistake I had made then I would have learned from properly collected data. I don't often gloss over my own mistakes, but honestly what would I have learned if things had gone the way I had expected them to? Just that the theory is right, ho-hum. But what I learned from my mistake was a more important lesson: that a good auction has to worry about how each step is iterated (how much higher than the previous bid you have to go). Now I knew this theoretically, but it just sprung magically to life when my own iteration rule stunk.

Here's something new: academics actually teaching me stuff. I could get used to this experimental stuff. I should be the poster child for ICES's motto:

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." -Benjamin Franklin

This is some great perspective that I constantly need to remind myself of.  I love the concept of "Failing Forward", but all too often end up forgetting about the concept when I'm in the midst of it.  I had a similar experience to Ali yesterday during my first presentation of a paper in our Graduate Student Paper Workshop.  I thought my paper was far more coherent, more clearly written, and more insightful than it apparently is.  I have a lot of work to do to improve as an economist and it was a painful (but good) lesson in what I need to improve.  I hope to get much more feedback like this on future papers.  Not only was it a lesson in learning from failure, but also one in humility as well.  (Thankfully, I started reading CJ Mahaney's book on humility about a week ago.)

Like Ali brilliantly pointed out, these lessons are far more valuable than what I would have learned had I done everything right.