What happens tomorrow?

"Pride goeth before destruction, and a high mind before the fall" - Shakespeare

I hope everyone here had a good time this New Year's Eve. I made a few resolutions (upgrade my job, be more genuinely humble, eat better, run a marathon) and perhaps I will stick to them. Perhaps you too have decided to upgrade some facet of your life, and I wish you well. Tomorrow starts another year and there's something that has been weighing on my mind for quite some time: learning from the mistakes of others. There's a lot said about going out and trying things, making mistakes and learning from them, and generally 'being your own person'. All fine and well, and it's easy to treat each success/failure as a right of passage towards wisdom. However, a bit of humility will allow us to absorb that wisdom indirectly and there are many instances where someone else does our learning experience for us.

Consider, for a moment, the last two decades or so:
1. We have seen an almost near collapse of our economy
2. The responses, while successful, were highly imperfect and will have their own ramifications
3. Our nation severely mismanaged several wars, engagements, occupations, and diplomatic relationships
4. TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS will continue to be spent on a highly dysfuncional incentive system with regards to medical payments, prevention, and disease management at the expense of genuine health management
4. The same goes for our educational system, especially areas like law
5. Some of the brightest minds on earth lost FORTUNES speculating on gold, bitcoins, housing, bogus internet companies, and other markets where there was clearly never any real investment value....and this cycle will repeat again in other sectors. It's just a matter of time.
6. Our nation voted for shockingly bad leaders...and then re-elected them. You can choose your camp, but half of the nation is in agreeance with this statement at any given point in time.

This list could become very long, but I think you get my point....and mind you this is the US, where things are pretty good relative to a lot of places. Fathom the misfortune of some other peoples and nations.

So why would reasonably intelligent people do such staggeringly dumb things, both on individual and collective levels? Why would they argue so vehemently in favor of such obviously bad ways to expend enormous amouns of time, effort, and resources? I honestly don't know. I do know that when I was younger I made some bad decisions, and our species is relatively young in its evolution...so maybe this is all just part of the learning curve. It seems that despite grand scale projects such our having been to the moon all the way down to seeing the atom in a microscope, we forget that our gift of reason does not exempt us from emotions, biases, accidents, and mistakes.

The reptilian part of our brain can overwhelm the monkey part of our brain, and the monkey part of our brain is far more active than our rational processes on any given day. As advanced as we are, humanity will continue to do stupid things, lots of them, over and over, and there's not much you can do about it. What we can do is learn from the mistakes of others, try to get ahead of the next disaster....and turn the future into an opportunity. We've all heard the saying "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme".

So what's my point?

YOU likely didn't make those mistakes I listed above. YOU understand the principles of why people did make those mistakes. YOU are responsible for your decisions. YOU could very likely profit, financially or otherwise, from other peoples' lapses in judgement. YOU can spare yourself enormous hardship by observing what other people have done.

All you have to do is pay attention and learn from the mistakes of others.

Happy New Year WSO!