There's no such thing as a completely worthless experience.
The common line that you can learn from any experience isn't a lie.
Still, I don't think you need to make wasteful mistakes.
If a preventable miss only hurts you, that's one thing — losing trust from people around you is not good. And basically, mistakes almost always affect others too.
Lately my volume of action has gone up, so the number of failures has inevitably risen too.
Has my mental toughness been trained? Not really — I still fall into self-loathing every time. But I feel I can switch gears a bit faster than before.
The cause is simply that I have more to do: when you're busy you have to switch, and more precisely my environment has changed again — I'm no longer in a setup where I have to immerse in only one environment.
That's a truly positive change. Depending too much on one variable, or being bound by it, is what I hate most — so being chased by many things in parallel keeps my mood more stable.
Writing this, I thought: even when many things get busy at once and variables increase, I don't mind — and that's good, if I say so myself. What I want to avoid is one variable getting too heavy a weight.
Building a portfolio of nothing but unstable elements for overall stability has the ominous ring of diversified management racing toward bubble-era collapse. (I can almost see the documentary: a thuggish anti-social-ish executive racks up outrageous debt, gets chased by banks, becomes homeless, touches human warmth, somehow launches a comeback business that works out, and looks back on who he was.)
If variables increase but I can keep my own pace — fine. Conversely, when I'm stuck, I now have a policy: add variables.
Ideally low-risk, high-upside ones. No — a portfolio of only those would be weak, and beyond risk and impact I want evaluation axes that let me add one interesting variable after another.
So when I don't want wasteful failure but wonder what to do, I ask whether an interesting variable might be born.
Because the evaluation axes are free, it might also train the ability to observe the subject.
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