Hindsight is 20/20. This phrase is usually trotted out after you've been scammed out of your heard earned money or made a huge mistake in your investments. Hindsight is the ability to look back on your life and see where you went wrong. A lot of people view it as a useless ability, because identifying mistakes you have already made won't allow you to go back in time and undo them. But hindsight can be very useful if you cultivate it and direct it. This article will teach you how to use your hindsight to prevent future mistakes.

It's a myth that once a mistake is made, you can't undo it. If the consequences of your bad call have not yet rippled out and affected you, or even if they had, you can still correct a mistake, but first you need to identify it. For example, if you can clearly see now that you made a mistake in accusing a friend of losing the DVD that you lent them, you can apologize and mend the relationship. Or, if you bought a house and then looked back to realize you couldn't really afford it, you can sell the house and attempt to start over.

Even if it is no longer possible to correct the mistakes you have identified in your past, you can still benefit from the knowledge. How? Well, what if a similar situation crops up in the future? If you never bothered to think back and realize that choosing a cottage in Muskoka over Mexico was a mistake, you won't have the opportunity to make the right choice the next time you're planning a vacation. The more knowledge you have, the better your decision making will be in the future. And your past has a lot to teach you.

In fact, why limit it to your own past? Other people's pasts have a lot to teach you as well if you're opened to it. There's an old saying that goes: "a smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others." What this means is that if you apply your powers of hindsight to evaluate the past decisions of others and the resulting consequences, you will be able to make the right choice the first time. Now that's useful.

Forewarned is forearmed. This is another common expression, and one that can apply to you and your powers of hindsight. Hindsight, which is a process of evaluating your decision making by looking at the results and consequences it had, can hone your powers of foresight, which is the process of predicting what the consequences of a decision might be. The more you learn about how the past, the better you will be able to predict what will happen to it in the future.