Learning from others failures or successes
I disagree to this notion that one should follow the examples set by others to be able to learn. In fact, in my opinion, you are person of your own and need to work on your own way in terms of your creativity, skills and talent in order to get knowledge about things and learn effectively.
First of all , we all people think and perceive things differently. We all are innovative on our own terms. And following the examples set by others simply means, we are not up for greater change . Without risk and going through things ourselves will not do us any good in learning process. For instance, I have a friend whose father is a great renowned businessman in our town. And everyone wanted my friend to follow the same path of career but she wanted to establish an art gallery by herself. She worked hard and used her own skills and finally achieved her goals. If she would have just followed her father's path and involved in his business, she wouldn't have been so successful and learned the things she wanted to.
Also, we can't be so sure if the examples set by others will be feasible for us. They might have been made in different circumstances which may not work for us for the time being. We need to access the situation beforehand and start doing things with our creativity to learn things. For example, there could be someone who is thriving in the share market. But he could be the one capable of taking risks and with good financial conditions and following the example of him and diving into this market without accessing our own finances and any prior knowledge about the market could eventually make us bankrupt.
In addition to that, learning by our own experience is an active learning process and will ensure better understanding of things in comparison to simply following what others have done. We can have better knowledge about how things can be run efficiently, what sort of risk can be avoided in the process, by our own assessment. For example, if we are establishing a restaurant in our area, we can't simply follow how other restaurant in nearby town has been running. We are introduced with different set of problems and risks which needs our own creativity to get solved.
In conclusion, I think learning should be more about doing things ourselves than just to follow the examples set by others. We should use our own curious and creative mind to assess situation and learn from our experience. Then only our learning can be more efficient and lifelong.