Learning from mistakes

This is the best and most frustrating way to learn. I spend a bit of time, OK maybe a little too much, on this site, and consistently read how people come here to learn and to share.

What better way to learn than to learn from others mistakes, if you are open enough to learn from them and humble enough to think you can learn anything from a site/community such as RBC.

I've made heaps of mistakes in my career, but hopefully I've taken a lesson from it. I learnt a lot politically this way, I was way to trusting at the start of my career and got burned subtly at the beginning.

A silly mistake... We had a huge drive back in the mid-late 90s when I was starting my career. I was overwhelmed by resumes, messages and general interest to a campaign my company was running. In a stressed mode with the idea of candidate care, I ensured I emailed every single applicant back thanking them for their response, promising a prompt response. However, sending them all individually seemed too time and effort intensive, so I put as many as I could on the one email and pressed send. I was new to technology, email (Eudora of all things) was new to me (I was still receiving cv's via fax and we kept hard copies), little did I realise that I put everyone in the "TO" part of the email. I was pretty proud of myself.... until the responses started coming back.. Guess what people were upset about a lack of confidentiality (and rightly so). My Managers were equally upset. I felt sick... my sentence.... I had to individually call every single person on the list, apologise for my error and smooth it all over. Let me assure you there were a lot of phone calls. I overcame, and after a few days of struggling to make eye contact with my managers, placements were made, the world turned and we kept moving forward. Was that day bad? yes... the worst I had in my career? No.. did I learn something, and not forgotten it EVER.. yes!

As this is a forum for learning and sharing, I am inviting people to add/share their mistakes that they have learnt from so that the rest of us can learn.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ray Towle on December 2, 2008 at 8:04am

Hey Dan,

Regrettably, Liddel Hart had it right when he wrote, "We learn from history only that we do not learn from history."
In life, few learn from their failures, and even fewer from their successes. That's the bad news.

But the good news is that this is a profession that rewards learning, and sometimes, openly sharing those costly lessons learned.

THANKS for your post!

All the Best!

Ray "Virtual Sourcer" Towle
p.s. Feel free to send me an Invite on Linkedin.
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Permalink Reply by Amy Hoster on December 2, 2008 at 1:21pm

What a great idea......

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Permalink Reply by Faisal Javed on December 2, 2008 at 2:20pm

Hey Dan,
This is what most of us did in their beginning... Hope that we will get some "nice" experiences. :)

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Permalink Reply by Sridhar on December 2, 2008 at 4:14pm

Hey Dan,

Yes.... Learning is never ending processs in our life.... We all learn until our last breath... Some from our Own mistakes and sometim from other by seeing/observing them.

Experience will always teach us a new lesson everyday.. It was a nice experience you shared.

Sridhar