Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. — Rita Mae Brown

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

Author: Rita Mae Brown

Insight: We live in a culture that treats mistakes like defects to be minimized, but this quote points at something closer to the truth: bad judgment is actually part of the machinery that produces good judgment. You can't really skip the step where you make the wrong call. The person who's never misjudged a situation is either very young or very sheltered—and their judgment remains untested in ways that matter. The tricky part is that we often learn this lesson too late, after spending years trying to be right. We avoid risks, second-guess ourselves, seek endless advice before deciding anything. But the person who took the job that didn't work out, ended a friendship the wrong way, or spent money foolishly—they gained something the cautious person didn't. They have a felt sense of consequences, not just an intellectual one. This doesn't mean being reckless. It means recognizing that getting knocked down and figuring out what went wrong is how judgment actually develops. Your worst decisions aren't failures to rise above—they're the raw material that makes you trustworthy later. The goal isn't to avoid bad judgment entirely; it's to eventually stop making the same bad judgment twice.