When we have a bad experience, we tend to either dwell on it or try and forget it.
The experience should not be something to dwell upon. Yet it should not be completely forgotten about. The bad experience should be transferred into tuition. Usually humans are not intelligent enough to see the bad experience as tuition - so it must be consciously transferred over to or acknowledged as tuition.
Tuition is the fee paid for instruction or course material.
After or during our course material, we pay a fee.
The course material may have put us through horrible or semi-horrible experiences such as examination, critical analysis, nervousness, anxiety. However it was just course material and from the course material we learned what to do and what not to do.
Why regret the experience, if the worry and scariness of the situation was just tuition "payment" that we had to give up to gain knowledge?
Bad experience does not cost money. The only tuition paid is the bad experience. It therefore is cheap compared to post-secondary education costs. In some cases, a bad experience will be combined with monetary costs too though.
Example 1
A lady goes to cook ground rice meal on the stove. She has cooked regular full rice several times before and is used to cooking. She puts the burner on maximum and pours the ground rice meal in with the water so that eventually the water will come to a boil. She walks away for a moment to attend to the mail that needs to be opened.
Once she hears the water is boiling she comes to the stove to turn it down. When she cooked regular rice she would simply come to turn the stove to minimum temperature. However, with the ground rice meal she finds that the pot is burnt and ruined since the rice meal sunk to the bottom and stuck to the hot pot. The pot needs to be thrown out since it is scorched and burnt black like charcoal.
At this point the lady has two options:
- She can yell and get angry with herself and dwell upon the situation. She may make angry statements such as "why would this happen to me today", "I've cooked rice many times, it must be a horrible day" or "I shouldn't put the stove on maximum like that, I must be an idiot for always doing that by habit".
- She can treat the situation as course material. Treat the burnt pot as the payment or tuition for the course. She can study why the pot got burnt this one time, but not all the other times. She can avoid getting emotional and simply study the reasons for having a burnt pot.
She isn't an idiot for putting the stove on maximum with regular rice - she just has to learn that ground rice needs to be cooked differently than full rice! In her first option, she assumes she's an idiot for putting the stove on maximum all the time. This is not the case. She just has to learn that not all rice is the same. Without recognizing that there is a tuition involved, she will not learn anything and will have wasted her tuition payment: the burnt pot.
Example 2
A man buys flowers for a lady. He immediately gets rejected and is told to stay away from her. There are two tuition fees here
- flower costs
- bad experience costs from the rejection
From this experience the man learns that next time, it may be better just to avoid buying flowers and find another way first to see if the woman is interested. From his bad experience he learned that not all women like him. From his flower cost he learned that he just wasted money.
Example 3
A man asks a lady out and gets rejected. He did not buy drinks, candy, or flowers. From this experience the man learns that not all women like him. He has wasted no money, but he did pay a tuition. His tuition was the bad feeling he received after being rejected.
The intelligent man studies the situation and learns something from the course material. He accepts the fact that tuition had to be paid in order for the course material to be studied. If he finds out that the woman was married then he learned that it was not his fault for trying - it just turns out she was not available and she may have openly accepted his gesture if she was not married.
The naive man dwells upon the situation or tries to forget it completely. He may make assumptions that the woman was mad at him or the woman didn't find him attractive. He doesn't stop to study the situation and learn that maybe it was just a case of her being unavailable at this time. He sinks lower and becomes depressed. He then repeats the same mistake again or doesn't try again at all when he recovers from his pain. By doing this, he is not learning, at life university.
Conclusion
There is tuition payment for a good reason - you don't learn without giving up money, time, or pain. The cliche "learn from your mistakes" is related to this theory. Consciously telling oneself that he is paying "tuition", and consciously telling oneself that he is getting his tuition's worth, is transferring "bad mistake" to a "good tuition cost". Learning from ones mistakes requires more conscious effort than just stating "I should learn from my mistakes".
One should visually imagine the mistake as "tuition" which is positive.. whereas the word "mistake" is more negative. A negative mistake may be something one tries to "forget" about completely, rather than a "tuition" which one tries to remember as a nice learning experience.
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