Learning is a way of life for people best at surviving and thriving. When change is constant, learning is an essential survival skill. 

Curiosity, questions, playing, experimenting, and laughing allow a person to learn valuable lessons from failures and develop new strengths. 

Carole Hyatt and Linda Gottlieb say that during the research for their book When Smart People Fail, they discovered that “almost everyone we talked to, especially the most currently successful people, had experienced some major failure in their past.” Their in-depth interviews with 176 successful people showed that “it is the way you cope with failure that shapes you, not the failure itself.” They found that most of the people they interviewed were learners and concluded, “If we learn from an experience, there can be no such thing as failure.” The benefits you gain from self-managed learning include being able to: 

• Read situations and new developments rapidly. 
• Handle change well. 
• Find a useful lesson in bad experiences and look forward to the next incident with positive, even eager anticipation. 
• Build self-confidence and become more willing to take risks. If things do not work out, you will still gain by learning something useful. 
• Try guidelines suggested by others to see how well they work for you. Then adapt and modify the guidelines to fit with your style, your situation, and your purposes. 
• Develop an increasingly accurate inner mental map of the world around you. . 
• Get better and better as the years go by. You are a constant learner in the school of life. You become more and more life smart. 
• Be the first to adapt or create a new way of doing something. You do not have to wait for others to solve prob‘ lems and teach you the solutions. 
• Learn new ways to be employable or provide a new service or product in a shifting, changing, unstable world.