When I was a student, I always learned from textbooks and practiced exercises inside. To be honest, I did pretty well and always got a good grade, but I couldn't understand why I should learn those things and how I can apply them in real life. I just learned them for the sake of getting a good grade.
When the grade went worst, I felt like I was a loser because the only thing I cared was the grade. I didn't care about the knowledge and where I could learn from mistakes.
From my perspective, this is a down-to-top mindset. The education forced us not to get into the society or start to do anything before we learned enough from theories, which are what they think we are supposed to learn. Just like building a house, we had to do the foundation and mix concrete first. Then we could start to build the house. But the problem is a human being is not a house. We should not be engineered.
Not until I started to do outdoor activities(since 2017) did I learned the mindset was so wrong. When I went outside to do mountain climbing, river tracing, or pack-rafting, I found players did not have to learn a lot of theories or knowledge to start those activities. Their mindset was top-to-down instead of down-to-top.
The mindset is so simple. Always start from an intention. Where I'd like to go? What I'd like to play? What I'd like to see? Who I'd like to talk to? Then they will start to think what to learn or prepare next. After all are done, they just tried it out. If anything went wrong, they did not blame themselves. They just learned from mistakes and kept trying again until they succeeded. That really shocked me. I just did not understand how they can embrace failures so gracefully. So I asked one of them: "Why you guys can be so persistent and patient to a goal?" He acted like hearing a non-sense question and said: "Why not?"
That's I learned from those weird but great people in the nature. So I decided to start a project called Where I did wrong. I record my mistakes and failures of my software implementations(for now) in this project, no matter how silly or non-sense they are. I just want to learn from mistakes and try to be a better person.