Experience is a poor teacher
If left unexamined, experience is a poor teacher.
Resulting — or thinking of a decision as good (or bad) if the outcome is good (or bad) — distorts what we learn from an experience. It makes us pick a wrong mental model to apply in the future.
Our initial experiences hold sway. They decide our world view. Instead of picking them apart, we afford them too much respect. We repeat low-quality decisions and we stop making high-quality decisions.
When later decisions start not turning out the way we had expected, we start blaming rotten luck. If the pattern continues, we start second-guessing ourselves. Now we have a mental model of how something’s supposed to work that’s getting muddier by the decision.
Finally, we declare that nobody knows anything.
This cycle may be familiar but is not inevitable.
