"A man's errors are his portals of discovery." - James Joyce

I read a lot. You will need to excuse this post because it is a compilation idea of some books I am reading or from one specific author. For lack of a better term, I will call the concept, "The Learning Stairs." It is not my unique concept.

I explained this concept to my business partner last night as we bemoaned business, taxes, and errors made in our first two years of business. Reveling in mistakes and war stories is something small business owners like to do.

Everyone knows the term, "Learning Curve." This is a cognitive psychology/memory concept where learning is represented by a graph of progress versus time spent learning a specific skill. It often results in a clean sloping line from left to right as progress is made learning and gaining experience in a certain skill. But, this is a theoretical representation graphing the averages of independent tests of a particular skill.

In actuality, learning and experience is more accurately graphed as a set of steps and not a clean curve. Starting at the bottom one goes along until the first wall that is the riser of the first step. This must be overcome through trial and error until the next level where one remains until challenged by the next step.

In business the runs and rises of the steps are mistakes. You learn from mistakes. We reviewed our business and laughed about our inexperience when starting out. We are still inexperienced, but we have learned to embrace errors learn from them and trudge up the stairs.