A Nation Of Wimps Summary

Failure and learning have a complicated, yet important relationship with each other. In ‘A Nation of Wimps’, Hara Marano writes about through trial and error humans can become successful. An article by Robert I. Sutton of the Harvard Business Review, talks about a method of learning from failures. Dr. Everett Piper describes in the article ‘This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University!’ that students who do not repent their sins can not learn from them. In the speech ‘This is Water’, by David Wallace he explains how learning to think is in a way knowing what to think about. An article by Bob Lenz titled ‘Failure Is Essential to Learning’ addresses the notion that failure is a key importance in the process of learning. Failure is an essential and important step in the difficult process of learning. Based on trial and error humans alike learn from their failures. In Hara Marano’s article ‘A Nation

Learning how to think in this way takes time and failure. This idea is what happens in schooling. A student is being taught how to think through lectures and a letter grade system in which tells the student if he or she needs to improve in a certain area. In this way students improve in knowing how to think. However, this is not all that goes into the idea of learning how to think. Quoting David Wallace he says “..being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” (Wallace, pg 3). To be able to do what David Wallace is talking about a person has to learn from their failures in the way they think. For example, if a person has a bad experience eating sea food such as salmon they learn from that failure, and probably will not eat salmon for a long period of time. Learning how to think about your failures is one of the main objectives in order to learn from those