Joys Of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning

by Gautam Baid

Make mistakes. Mistakes highlight unforeseen opportunities as well as gaps in our understanding. And mistakes are great teachers. As Michael Jordan once said, “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” The takeaway is that we cannot come out with a correct solution on the first attempt. Start with a probable solution (hypothesis) and continue correcting the mistakes until you arrive at the right solution. Thomas Edison was famous for using this approach for his inventions. When he said that invention is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, the perspiration was the process of incrementally making mistakes and learning from them to make the next attempts apt to be closer to right. When Edison was asked how he felt about his countless failed attempts at making a light bulb, he replied, “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”