Keep Failing?

The truest fact that you can have in an investment prospectus is read: “Past performance does not reflect future performance.”

It's true but somehow, we always “believe” that whatever happened in the past will actually reflects on how it is in the future. Simply said, in an investment vehicle, for example, we believe in what we call “track record”. We believe that when an investor or an investment manager perform in the past, the will perform the same in the future. But it's not always happen as such.

Same thing happen in our relationship: our past experience does not reflect your future. Some of us have had failed relationship in our life. I had one. Others have more. But when we failed to see that the past does not at all reflect the future, we failed to get up.

A historian once told this famous quote: “History is there to teach us that men will never learn from history.” Why do we fail all the time? Simple: we keep repeating the same mistake.

When we failed in our business, does that mean we will fail again? Yes. If we do the same thing all over again. Same with love and relationship: when we try to do the same thing that resulted in our failure, we'll simply repeat our failure.

But, when we look back at why people always look at the track record when they are doing investment, we found out one thing. Track record provides us the information on how well the manager do their job. Or in other word, we would like to be assured that they are actually doing the right thing and know how to do the right thing.

So let's make it simple. One friend of mine quote, “Learn from those who have made it. Not those who know it and seemed to made it.” The reason why we keep failing in our business, relationship, academic and all the things we do... is that we do the same thing again and again and again and again... Learn from those who have made it. They don't made it by doing the same thing all over again. Edison creates the light bulb after a thousand failures and finally find the right way to made one... simply because he keep trying to find a different way.

Let me end this post with a memorable quote: “Those big shots are not the ones who shoot big. They are the ones who keep shooting.” So, keep shooting. Just aim better.