History
getting back to the burned hand being the best teacher, it seems some people tend to forget how they burned their hand in the first place because they try never to look back. i keep hearing people say ‘i live one day at a time’ and ‘i live for the present’. most humans live for the present and don’t worry about the future, and once the future is upon them they wonder why things are worse now than they were before. i think what they’re failing to realize is the full paraphrase, which is:
learn from the past, plan for the future, and live for the present.
the three are inter-twined, and it is misleading to quote just the last part without the prior two.
one way to learn from the past is to take some time out to reflect on your own personal history, realize the mistakes you’ve made, accept those mistakes, and understand how and why you’ve made those mistakes. once this is accomplished it makes it much easier to plan for the future so that you can avoid making the same mistakes again.
with those two accomplished, it’s much easier and enjoyable to live for the present.
another great way to learn from the past is to learn from other people’s mistakes. no matter how different people are, and how individual we all are, i’ve found it extremely rare for someone to make a mistake that someone else hasn’t already made long before them. with this realization, it’s easy to turn to the experiences of other people and learn from them in order to become a better person yourself.
countless billions of other people have come before you and spent time and energy figuring things out and thinking things through and becoming better people in the process and teaching others and learning, always learning. this is an almost limitless supply of resources to turn to.
after all, isn’t that why we all go to school?
as the philosopher george santayana said; “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
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