How much can you learn from hindsight?

The old proverb of hindsight is 20/20 means it is easy to understand something after it has already happened. However, it’s only easy to understand what happened if you put in the time to do so.

There’s very little benefit in hindsight if you don’t take time to evaluate your prior experience and then learn from it. Just looking back and thinking ‘ok that happened’ is of very little use to you.

Now I agree that life is not linear and what happened before might not occur again, but there are clues hidden within all of your experiences that you can use to avoid making choices and or decisions that were detrimental to you the first time around.  Obviously you don’t need to or shouldn’t evaluate all of your experiences, but the big ones, the ones that you know or think that you could have or should have done differently require at least a little contemplation.

Hindsight is not about living in the past, but learning from it. It’s about looking back at what already happened to see how matters can be improved the next time around. And since you can’t see into the future doesn’t it just make sense to at least use the experience and information you already have as a starting point for future major decisions?

I’m by no means recommending that you develop an obsession for hindsight to the point where you’re stuck in analysis paralysis. What I am suggesting is that since you’ve already lived through experiences that have changed your life for the better or worse, why not leverage hindsight to experience more of former and less of the latter?

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