I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

Igor Stravinsky, Russian composer

Can you learn to have better judgement? The answer is plainly yes, because we do in fact get better at decision making. You will learn comparatively little from the decisions you get right; a great deal, however, from the decisions you got wrong.

The key to learning is to identify – in your own reflective thinking or with the help of others – the lessons that this unpleasant experience has to teach you. It is by this method that you build up your own body of knowledge about how to think clearly, to make decisions and solve problems, to involve others in the right way, to generate your own ideas and to listen to the ideas of others.

All that a book like this one can do is to cut down the time that you take to learn from experience. It does so by offering you principles to consider. Learning happens when the sparks jump between principles and experience, theory and practice.

We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.

Marcel Proust, French novelist