I learned much from my teachers

I learned much from my teachers, more from my books, and most from my mistakes.

Unknown

The meaning of the quote

In the late 1970s, a British designer named James Dyson ripped the bag off his vacuum cleaner because it kept losing suction. He had trained at the Royal College of Art in London, so he knew how to design a product. Building one that worked took him 5 years and 5,127 prototypes.

The quote ranks 3 ways to learn and puts mistakes at the top. It’s a fresh spin on an old line from the Talmud, where Rabbi Hanina says he learned much from his teachers, more from his colleagues and most from his students. This version keeps the same climb and swaps in books and mistakes.

Teachers

A teacher saves you years of guessing. A driving instructor who reminds you to check your mirror before you pull out spares you a lot of near misses.

But a teacher can only give you what fits into a lesson. As the Chinese proverb goes, teachers open the door, and you have to walk through it on your own.

Books

Books give you more teachers than any school can. Abraham Lincoln had about 1 year of school in his whole life and taught himself law from books, becoming a lawyer in 1836.

A book still can’t tell when you’ve misread it, though. It gives the same lesson whether it sinks in or not.

Mistakes

A mistake is the only lesson written just for you. You made the choice and you felt the cost, so the memory sticks. Dyson looked back on his prototype years in a 2007 interview with Fast Company.

“There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one.”

The sting of being wrong may even help you remember. Scientific American reported on research where people answered general knowledge questions and rated how sure they were. When they were confident and wrong, they were more likely to remember the right answer once corrected than when they had only guessed. Psychologists call this the hypercorrection effect.

A mistake only teaches you if you look back at it, and most of us would rather forget it fast. Yoda called failure the greatest teacher, and a teacher only helps the students who show up.

Exercise:

Which teacher are you skipping?

Most people lean on 1 source and ignore the rest. Pick a skill you’re working on right now, like cooking, coding or speaking up in meetings, and go through these steps.

1. Trace what you know.
   List 5 tricks or habits you use in that skill and note whether a teacher, a book or a mistake taught you each one.
2. Name your last 3 mistakes.
   For each one, write what it taught you. If you can’t find a lesson, you made the mistake but missed the class.
3. Keep a mistake log for 30 days.
   Each time something goes wrong, write 1 line on what happened and 1 line on what you’ll do next time. Read it back at the end of the month.

Art school taught Dyson design, and 5,126 failed vacuums taught him how to build one that works.

Resources

• Invention: A Life (Book)
• Failure Doesn’t Suck (Article)
• Certainty Principle (Article)
• The greatest teacher, failure is (Article)
• Mistakes are the portals (Article)
• Ta’anit (Wikipedia)