Do you try to learn from other peoples mistakes?

I do, and every sane, intelligent person I know does. Except for my son, who when I admonished him to learn from other people’s mistakes and save himself and the rest of us a lot of anguish, replied, “Mom, I can’t learn from anyone’s mistakes other than my own.”

I knew then I was destined for an “interesting” life. It is.

Growing up my mom watched a lot of soap operas. I learned from watching them that it is never good to keep skeletons in your closet. Live your life as an open book and no one can hold your secrets against you.

I live to make new and original mistakes and fastidiously avoid copying those of others and once I learn what were my own errors, I strive for originality is my own mistakes as well.

Yes , I can learn vicariously from others and hope I remember to avoid such errors and mistakes but not always ; I’m still trying and learning .
=)

I have trouble trying to learn from my own mistakes, but I do try to learn from others as well.

Yes; I try to, but we often can’t see our own circumstances the same as we see other people’s, so I have made mistakes with my heart that I knew better with my head (does that make sense?). I did use other people’s mistakes to teach my son as we grew up—whether it was parents who were too lackadaisical or the ones who over-indulged and over protected, I tried to use other people’s issues to help my son understand why I ran our household the way I did, and to see the consequences of other people’s mistakes.

No. I watched people who did that, and it didn’t seem to help them. So I learned from their mistake not to make that mistake. ~

Only a foolish person would not try to avoid a mistake of their own by observing and learning from the mishaps of others.

Story of my life. It worked pretty well for me thus far. I highly recommend it for a better life.