It should be wise to learn from the mistakes of others. Unfortunately, we only learn some things from our mistakes. Many times we don't learn anything, so the lesson is repeted.

I agree that some mistakes are yours alone to learn from however I always liked this quote too: "You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself." - Sam Levenson

Yep... you wouldnt think it but its true... I will not stick my finger in that light socket again. I stood on the toilet to discover that lesson... knocked my ass off too. Such a tender age too....lol.

First of all, making mistakes is a part of the human experience but hopefully we build up from the earliest building blocks and do not have to start from scratch every time.

Second, that comma ought to be a period!

I agree that we learn from our mistakes, but I think we also learn by seeing other make mistakes too, or reading about them, or perhaps by forward thinking and looking at possible outcomes and the consequences.
For instance, I don't need to be hit by a train to know not to stand on the railway tracks when the train is coming.

Your only as good as your last decision.

I was once told by one of my first bosses, (while barely a teenager)," If you never make a mistake, you're not trying". Truly words of wisdom.

Mistakes are like failures,you gotta embrace them..

Truth

Oh yeah... I heard that smart people learns from others mistakes... but every scar, every scrape is a story to tell. The smart ones only have interpretation of what happened to somebody else. I will never learn much from a genius. They never have people skills... So take a look at something like in sports... You can learn a lot from sports if you observe without bromance. The great ones never become great head coaches or managers or trainers. They say the captain of the titanic had a perfect record. Never, ever had a problem, so the first time he had a problem he failed miserable. A lesser captain may had acknowledge that you got to have enough boats for the crew and the passengers and that there is no such thing as an unsinkable boat. Just saying.... lessons you experienced are the best learned. The ones you remember best. If anything else... the scars remind you.

Or get an education

I totally agree with you. I have learned much more from my mistakes than everything else.

Life is a treasure, as long as you can walk away, that's all that really matters. Sometimes what today appears as a mistake will be tomorrows great achievement..but that's life and what makes it worth living. Never sell yourself short on life's highway!

We remember the lessons from our own mistakes better than when we watch others make mistakes. But we can recognize them as mistakes easier when it is someone else doing it than as we are doing it ourselves...

I am a great believer in this !

If I don’t make 5 mistakes a day I haven’t done a thing.

I thought I made a mistake once but I was mistaken.

edited to fix a mistake

Not necessarily, observe other people’s mistakes so you can avoid those ones.

Sorry, my mistake. Didn't mean to click on this post. But I guess my experience won't teach you anything about being too fast to react to click-bait...

If you really believed this, you wouldn't post it. For there would be nothing for us to learn from it...

which goes to your first question of, 'do we need a structured life?'

Sure. You can't reliably pass on the benefit of your experience to your children. People warned me about all the crap I was going to encounter in life when I was young and it was just so much blah-blah-blah-adults talking-blah blah until I experienced it first hand.

It is the conceit of every generation that it understands how to easily ace life in ways that its progenitors did not. The only consolation is that I get to listen smugly to my children, step-children and grandchildren make the same hubris-filled mistakes and just patiently wait for life to beat those illusions out of them and make them wish they had listened to me in the first place.

Life is perverse and absurd in that way -- you don't know what you haven't experienced and don't trust what others experience when their experience points away from things you desperately want and everything in pop culture tells you that you can have, like certitude, cost-free and risk-free puppy love, rainbows and unicorns, etc.

Excellent point! And IMO those mistakes are good and necessary—they are not sins against God. There’s no such thing as a sin.

For example, as a little kid I ran around kicking everything, peeing in the flower pots, and I sawed notches in the furniture. I HAD to go through that stage of development. No sins were involved. As a horny young man I would lie or do about anything to get laid. Now that was definitely a mistake because I was projecting my neediness and offering nothing of value. I had to go through that stage.

Things have to happen. It is our choice to view the world with an air of grievance and dismay, or we can look with appreciation and love.