It’s great to learn from your mistakes, and it’s even better to learn from someone else’s. Failure stories can be quite useful. But financial expert Ramit Sethi argues that you shouldn’t listen to just anyone’s failure advice — you should listen to those who have failed, but then succeeded.
Photo by Chris Potter
On his I Will Teach You to Be Rich blog, Sethi points out that we have a mild obsession with stories of failure. And this is fine, he says, as long as we use failure strategically. He offers a few ways of doing this, one of them being:
Choose carefully whom you listen to about failure..Let me be very clear: Anyone can offer you advice. But it’s up to you to decide whose advice you take. Put another way, it’s great to relate to people who have failed…We can learn from people who have failed, but dusted themselves off and learned from their failures…and then went on to succeed.
I think Sethi offers an interesting piece of insight here. It’s good to learn from people’s mistakes, but we probably stand to learn more from people who have made mistakes and then actually managed turn things around and succeed. This is probably especially true it comes to stories of financial missteps. It helps to know what money mistakes you should avoid, but it’s even more useful to know what to do instead.
Check out Sethi’s full post for more detail.
Who should you listen to about failure? [I Will Teach You to Be Rich]
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