Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time. — George Bernard Shaw

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Insight: We tend to think of successful people as having some special immunity to failure—that they somehow get it right the first time. But the real dividing line is much simpler: they're willing to actually learn from what goes wrong. The person who makes a mistake and then repeats it hasn't really failed once; they've failed twice, and the second time hurts more because it was preventable. What makes this tricky in real life is that we're often terrible at recognizing when we're repeating ourselves. We convince ourselves this situation is different, or that circumstances changed, or that last time we just got unlucky. It takes real honesty to sit with a mistake long enough to understand what actually happened and why. Most people skip that step and move on, which means they're likely to stumble the same way again down the road. The quiet power in Shaw's idea is that it makes success feel almost mundane—not about being brilliant or avoiding pitfalls, but about the unglamorous work of paying attention to your own patterns. That's actually liberating. It means failure isn't shameful; it's just expensive information if you're willing to use it.

Source: Man and Superman, 1903