Profiting from Your Past Mistakes (In Life, Business, and Investing)

Where did you learn your real life, business, and investing lessons?

If you’re anything like me then they probably came out of the mistakes you’ve made. Sure, the times you got everything right taught you something, but our successes also tempt us into static patterns or rigid solutions. Rarely do they lead to the truly profound insights.

The more profound lessons tend to come from the occasions when we don't get it right. So let’s take a little time together to reflect on these lessons and to profit from them.

Looking back over your life, what are the three most important lessons you’ve learned?

You can focus this question on your life as a whole, on your business, on your investing, or any specific area of your life you choose.

Here are a few of my top life lessons:

Most things end, often unexpectedly, so savor them now. Enjoy them now. Appreciate them now. Take more photographs; write more in my journal. Keep reminding myself to truly savor my life right now.

Or…

I am incredibly resilient. I can handle just about anything. So I should let go of my worries and anxieties. I cannot control life but I can move gracefully through it.

What are some of your top life lessons?

What about in business? What are some of your top business lessons?

Here are a few of my top business lessons:

With the right “partners” anything is possible and easy. Partners may be team members, they may be joint venture partners, they may be advisors or mentors, or they may be actual partners. With the right people doors open, markets move, and value is easy to create and capitalize on.

Document, document, document! Most rough business moments could have been avoided by clarifying relationships and responsibilities better in writing. When in doubt, spell it out!

In the world of investing, here are some of my top lessons:

Value my cash more. When I have a lot of it I tend to discount its real worth. But it is precious, so I should spend it only when I am getting an incredible value.

Evaluate my investments against my written criteria, and run key investments past my advisors to have them make sure I am making my choices from my best and highest self, not from my greedy, “there’s so much money to be made in this move” nor from my “I have to invest now or I’ll lose out” selves.

What are some of your most important investing lessons?

Remember, you’ve already made your mistakes and paid for them. But by turning them into key lessons to guide your future behavior you transform the price you paid in your past into an investment that will yield huge payoffs for you — again and again.

I hope these thoughts weren’t too heavy for you going into a holiday weekend, but my intuition says you are someone who appreciates how critical it is to reflect to move forward.