History Is A Great Teacher

Whenever we start on something new, a new job, a new role, or a new task, we are always eager to get on with it and show results. We start with trying to understand the current situation, and then we jump right away into doing work.

Somewhere in this process, we forget to ask ourselves, “Who were there before me, what was done by them before I got here. Was there something done in the past that I could learn from. Something good that I could learn from and repeat, and something not so good that I could be careful about and avoid repeating.”

Unfortunately, the problem is that we don’t respect the power of the past-“history,” as I would call it. So, we forget that a lot would have happened before we came on to the scene. We blunder our way through trying to do different things without realising that they probably were done in the past. In this process, we lose valuable time trying to figure out how to do something, when all along the past lessons were always available, waiting to guide us.

In almost all situations, the place where we are today, many others would have gone through before us. Studying the history of what they did can help us learn and leverage.

If we don’t make an effort to know what happened in the past, we will keep repeating history instead of creating one. History is a teacher that informs our present and shapes our future.