Only fools learn from their mistakes…

..the smart ones learn from others.

This idea is attributed to Otto Von Bismarck in a number of sources.

The idea is great: why fill your own troubles when you can do it with someone else’s hands and not get dirty. Many people really believe that it works.

In reality, this works extremely rarely. The truth is that other people’s mistakes are rarely indicative of us. And this is due to the presence of a typical cognitive distortion — the “overconfidence effect.” A person often overestimates his capabilities (including cognitive ones) in a situation and, accordingly, underestimates the capabilities of others: “well, Vasya didn’t manage to sell the product to a client, but I can!”, “Lucy didn’t succeed.” fool this guy, but I’ll definitely succeed!” etc. And once you receive confirmation of this thought, that’s it — the person plunges headlong into this distortion. From that moment on, he is so confident in himself that other people’s mistakes begin to be seen as a consequence of their “narrow-mindedness”, “stupidity”, therefore, this can happen to these people, but definitely not to him!

This is aggravated by the presence of a cognitive distortion called the “blind spot effect.” A person makes decisions and takes actions in accordance with his own projection of reality, and not taking into account the objectivity and facts of reality. People with this distortion tend to overestimate their own awareness.