No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from success to go beyond the state of the art. -Henry Petroski

Mistakes and missteps in life are painful but incredibly helpful if we don’t waste them.

When you make a decision in your church, business or life and it doesn’t pan out as you expected, what do you do with that? You can either let it go and move on pretending it never happened. You can mope about life being hard and waste the experience. Or you can dissect the decision and learn from it.

Only one of those choices will actually move you forward; the other two will keep you stuck or move you backwards.

In The Prepared Mind of a Leader: Eight Skills Leaders Use to Innovate, Make Decisions, and Solve Problems, the authors give four questions to ask as you reflect on an action or decision in your life:

1. What did I/we expect to accomplish?
2. What, in fact, did I/we accomplish?
3. Why are the answers to questions 1 and 2 different? (Notice that the question is not, “Who’s to blame?”)
4. What actions do we have to take to make sure this does not happen again? In other words, what did we learn?