Home » Don't Cry Over Spilt Milk

I am sure everyone must have spilt milk in their childhood. I do remember I had once prepared nice rose milk for myself ( rose milk is popular in India ) and I was simply doing timepass and was playing with the glass full of milk. Unfortunately, my hand struck hard and the glass fell down. Oops!! The milk was all spilt. I was scared because I knew it had all increased my mom's work of cleaning, collecting the glass pieces and cleaning the milk stains. As a result, I started crying, started using the last weapon to gain sympathy!!
My mom told me not to cry over the spilt milk. These were merely five words but had ocean of wisdom.

Today, when I recall this, I feel that we should really not cry over the spilt milk but learn from our mistakes and try to avoid them in future. I have seen many students who appear for an exam and fail to perform good in the exam. So, after the exam, they start thinking for a long on how bad the exam was and spend hours in that. The obvious consequence is students not able to perform well in immediate next exam because they just spent time in crying over what happened in previous exam. So, a good piece of suggestion is not to think for a long on the exam , but instead learn from the mistake and to avoid that.

A friend of mine went for a job interview but failed to clear that. So, he could not take that failure and just kept thinking and got depressed because of this. Two days later he had another interview and he managed to fail that too because of earlier failure and moreover, not getting into the zeal for attempting next interview. So, one more good opporutnity was lost. The same friend later changed this approach and never got disturbed beacuse of any failure. As a result, now, failure hardly touched him. The gist is learn from the mistakes and don't cry over spilt milk.

There is another proverb which says "try, try, but don't cry". This is also analogous proverb. So, the summary is to learn from the mistakes and keep on trying for the things without spending time crying over what has happened in the past instead of following "Cry, cry but don't try". This can really mess up the future things.

Basically, crying over spilt milk simply wastes the time and that time can be really used to do something more creating, innovative and value additive work. Moreover, spending time in crying leads to nothing but it decreases confidence and morale. It makes person feel gloomy. As a result, there is hardly any motivation left and the environment is filled with negative vibrations. Person tend to loose hope and cheerfulness. It makes person stressed and tired. A person starts feeling depressed. As a result, the tendency or the likelihood is that the future thing can go wrong. So, the good approach is once the things are already gone or just interospect, learn from the mistake and follow a better approach the next time.

Failure is not an uncommon thing. But learning from failure is comparitively difficult. And learning from failure and implementing new approach or avoiding previous mistakes and achieving success is much more difficult. This is nothing but an evolutionary process.