It has taken me my whole life to learn how to learn, for example, from my mistakes. My standard model of learning from my mistakes was always a bit like Mark Twain's remark -- "A boy who picks up a cat by the tail to carry it, learns something he can learn in no other way". It was the hand on the hot stove, the obviously stupid act that had immediate, shocking consequences, and had the response: "I will never do that again!"

But over the course of time I have found that that kind of learning from big mistakes is too easy. In fact, most of the real mistakes I have made are slow, multiple, insidious; and those that have caused me the greatest pain -- loss of love, loss of money, loss of respect -- did not happen in one day. They happened gradually, with a web of small mistakes, insensitivities, cut corners, not paying quite enough attention.

What finally broke me of them (those that I have broken) was, again, not a single shock, but the grinding over and over again into me of the consequences of failure, yes, sometimes accompanied by a big initial shock, but mostly just having to pull myself back up, hand over hand, out of some terrible swamp of my own creation. I have cried out: please, I know, I get the idea, I won't do it again -- but it goes on, grinding its lesson into me. And so I really learn, finally, when I am so sick of it that it has burned the habit out of me. It makes sense: it took time getting into the mess, and it will take time getting out of it. The habits are deep: so recognising their effects takes evidence upon evidence. I wish it didn't work that way, but it does, for me, anyway. It is a part -- the hardest part -- of learning how to learn from my mistakes.