Interesting conversation going on at Monday Morning Insight and Slow Leadership about why we keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
“Given the number of mistakes most of us make, you would think we would quickly learn how to do better. Mistakes involve pain, embarrassment and loss—things no one likes to experience—yet many are more or less easily preventable. Saying that human beings are imperfect is true but doesn’t get us much further forward. We may all be imperfect, fallible creatures, but is there nothing we can do to lessen our tendency to screw things up?”
Well, just off the top of my head I can think of two big reasons we don’t learn from our mistakes.
One is that we don’t really want to change. Sure there’s pain involved in our mistakes, but sometimes we actually prefer the pain we’re used to rather than the pain we would incur by trying to change.
The second is that even when we really do want to change and we’re willing to endure the pain involved, we have developed bad thought patterns that are extremely difficult to break. We react automatically without even realizing what we’re doing perhaps with anger or lust or reading blog articles when we ought to be working.
What about you? Why do you think we keep making the same mistakes?