Chapter 4HOW TO TURN IT AROUND Why you don't learn from your mistakes

Michael Jordan, the famed basketballer and arguably one of the world's greatest ever athletes, once said in a well-scripted Nike commercial, ‘I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 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’.

With quotes like this, and Insta memes aplenty, it's easy to get caught up in the romantic notion that we learn from our mistakes, that failure is our opportunity to improve and that a setback is just the beginning of our comeback.

But take a moment to recall the subject that you didn't do so well in at school. If you aced all your subjects in the senior years, there's a chance that you made choices in your junior years to let go of other subjects you didn't do so well in. Somewhere along the line you can think of a subject or class at school in which you didn't do well.

If you agree with Jordan’s thinking, you should have succeeded in that subject, right? After all, you would have failed over and over and over again in that class? So why didn't you succeed?

Now while I actually ...

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