How to Learn from Your Mistakes and Make Better Decisions

We all have scores of decisions to make every day, and we often want to move quickly, telling ourselves that speed equals efficiency. But true efficiency sometimes requires slowing down, being mindful, and especially looking back at the decisions we’ve made that didn’t go as we’d hoped. Too often we don’t want to spend time and mental energy revisiting the past, especially if it contains uncomfortable missteps. But stopping and looking carefully at those mistakes is exactly what can help us make better decisions moving forward. Think of your past decisions as a dataset that you can mine for insights. They can help you identify biases and assumptions that may be holding you back, develop strategies to shift your behavior going forward, and ultimately feel more confident that your process will lead to positive outcomes. A series of six questions can help you apply lessons from your past decisions to your current situation.