"You must understand your mistakes. You're not going to have the chance of making the same mistake again--you can't step into the river again at the same place and the same time--but you will have the chance of making a similar mistake."
This is one area I'm a little cautious of. while it is important to understand our mistakes, to overly focus on them may do more harm then good. I'm not talking about ignoring them and not learning from them, I mean there are better things to focus on than that.
If we get excessive in analyzing our mistakes, we can find ourselves obsessing on those things we may not be good at or learned from once. Again, if we make big enough mistakes, we won't need to try to look at them, they'll stare us in the face enough on their own.
It seems to me it's better to look at what we're trying to accomplish today and going forward, than to look at past failures that probably beat us up more than offer constructive output.
Again, it's not that we deny things we've done wrong, it's just that once we learn there's no reason to stay in that mud puddle and splash around in it till the mud stays on us forever.
Learn and then go on to what we need to do next. That seems much more valuable and profitable to me than the alternative.
As long as our mistakes aren't the type that bring down the company, we can survive a number of them throughout the years. The key is making more good decision than bad ones.
Any business leader will find themselves in the plus column and doing ok even with the mistakes they make. We need to look more to the next big success we're working toward rather than the last failure we had.
Sure, understand our mistakes, then go on and leave them behind us where they belong. Too much emphasis on them can become a self-fulfilling prophecy migrating to a vicious cycle. I think we should look ahead rather than look behind.
Other Andy Grove Resources:
Andy Grove's Rational Exuberance
The Digital Age . . . driven by the passion of Intel's Andrew Grove
The History and Influence of Andy Grove
Andy Grove enters new post-Intel role as activist capitalist
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