Mistakes- (Direct and Vicarious) & Blowing Up

We, human beings, tend to make a hell lot of mistakes in our life time.
So... Is it Ok to make mistakes?
Tried asking this by Google Uncle & found the following answers-

"If you don't make mistakes, you aren't really trying."                                           -Coleman Hawking

"The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. "                    -Edward Phelps

"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one." -Elbert Hubbard

"If you aren’t making any mistakes, it’s a sure sign you are playing it too safe."     -John Maxwell

These kinda quotes makes me believe its good (even great) to make mistakes.

So, I, hereby, plan to decide to make at least one mistake everyday!!!

How's that for a plan?? Exactly its Idiotic.

So what should we do with mistakes?

I would say our aim should be learn a lot from vicarious mistakes, make less of direct mistakes (and learn from them, if made) and absolutely avoid Blow-ups. 

Let me explain the terms-

Direct Mistakes- These are the mistakes made by us. We should try to minimise them & learn from them because its a painful and time-consuming experience to make these mistakes & you won't go anywhere if you make all the mistakes yourself.

Vicarious Mistakes- These are the mistakes made by others. These should be our maximum source of learning. As Munger puts it- "You don't have to pee on an electric fence to learn not to do it." 

You should read newspapers not to know what's going around but to see a lot of vicarious mistakes made by others. And you should also use your mistakes in one field & learn from them to not make mistakes in other fields.

Blow Up- I don't know who coined this word but it was introduced to me by Taleb. It essentially means making such a huge blunder that you don't get a 2nd chance to rectify your mistake. Once you make it, and that's it, you are gone. Gone forever. No Second chance.

What causes Blow Ups?

Being a lollapalooza outcome, it has to involve a number of factors.....

Bad strategy + Excessive Over-confidence (Excessive Leverage) + Bad- luck = Blow-up

All three are essential for a complete blow-up.

If you can avoid blow-ups (Blow-Ups, and not Blow-Up, because we can blow-up one field of life & can still have a normal life in other fields of life & hence have a chance to blow-up other fields as well) you should do OK in life even if you don't learn anything from vicarious experiences. If you do learn from then as well, you should do super...