It’s great to learn from your own mistakes, but even better to learn from somebody else’s. 

When I worked in client-side marketing, I took a job managing new products. This was a responsibility I’d never had before, as my previous positions had been on established businesses. This business unit had a near-zero success rate when it came to new product introductions, so my first priority was to identify factors that might explain the high failure rate. One commonality I found was that many of the new product concepts the company had tested quantitatively and qualitatively were fatally flawed, making failure nearly inevitable.

This served as a course on how to write concepts – I learned from the mistakes I found and was able to put this knowledge to good use. In other words, I learned to write new product concepts by first learning how not to write them.

We all make mistakes. That’s part of life. In fact, if you’re not making mistakes, it means that either you’re not trying hard enough, or you’re not taking risks. You’ll never accomplish much with that approach.

Learning from your mistakes is a fundamental life skill. However, by itself it’s insufficient for success. If you’re going to stay ahead of the pack, you also need to learn from the mistakes of others – another essential life skill. You might even say that this is a little-known superpower. There’s actually a technical term for gaining knowledge from others’ experiences: ‘social learning.’

It’s preferable to learn from others’ mistakes than your own, for a number of reasons:

Your ego interferes with learning from your own mistakes. You’re emotionally detached from other people’s mess-ups. While it’s hard to view your own mistakes objectively – or even to admit you’ve made a mistake at all – taking a clear-eyed look at somebody else’s error is not so difficult. It can actually boost your own ego. There’s probably no better way to feel smug and self-satisfied than the realization that you didn’t make the same mistake the other guy made.

The consequences are not yours to bear. When it’s your own mistake, you must shoulder the costs and clean things up. Not so when it’s somebody else’s misstep. You get to observe from a distance and chart a better course while they deal with the mess.

There are just more mistakes from which to learn. The quantity of other people’s mistakes you can observe will always dwarf your own. Thus, observing and learning from the mistakes of others – social learning – is a force multiplier.

So, make a practice of learning from the mistakes of your fellow humans. Remember – if they’re smart, they’re learning from yours, so you might as well return the favor.