FORGOTTEN HISTORY: Accidentally destroyed expensive items | History Defined

Noelle told Bored Panda that there are a lot of reasons why we justify our mistakes and she told us a couple of the main ones. "We don't like feeling negative emotion and the goal is very often to 'get back' to a positive state. If we can justify something we did wrong, we don't have to feel bad about it anymore."

She continued with the second reasons: "We want to protect our positive self image. Justifying a mistake means that I didn't do anything wrong or whatever went wrong wasn't my fault. That means I can still feel like I'm 'good.'"

Noelle said that her research suggests that taking the time to stop and feel the negative emotions associated with the mistake helps a person learn from that mistake. "We find that it's not enough to just think about the mistake and why it happened. Our brains are designed to be guided by emotion, so actually feeling that negative emotion is important," she said.

"In our experiments, people who were asked to feel those negative emotions corrected their behavior on a similar task later on. This happened even though they didn't know the tasks were connected! That suggests that the emotional learning doesn't have to be consciously done by a person; simply making sure to allow oneself to feel those negative emotions leads to learning."

Noelle revealed to us that lately she's been working on research that addresses why people have a hard time changing their minds about important topics and how we might be able to communicate in a way that would help them absorb new information that they don't necessarily agree with. "Generally, how people process emotions and thoughts is important in how they learn, function and interact with their environment."

Reddit user Approx- told Bored Panda that they started the subreddit back in March 2018, as a result of a comment made by another user, Deathtastic.

According to Approx-, the subreddit grew steadily and naturally gained users since it was first created. "We haven't really done anything in particular to make it grow, other than ensuring content is well moderated," they said.

"I think the appeal of expensive mistakes is twofold. First, it's just straight-up entertainment to see expensive things destroyed. But I think it also gives folks a bit of a sense of relief that maybe their screw-ups aren't all that bad after seeing a multi-million dollar mistake," Aprrox- said.

The ‘That Looked Expensive’ subreddit has more than 416k members and the community has been going strong since it was first founded.

It’s one thing to mess up as an individual but it’s a whole other ball game when companies or countries mess up. For example, back in 2000, Netflix approached Blockbuster with an idea to take care of the digital part of their company. Blockbuster said ‘no’ and, well, we don’t have to tell you how things worked out over the next two decades for both companies, do we? A ‘yes’ instead of a ‘no’ and we could still have a healthy version of Blockbuster!

Another costly blunder happened when the so-called ‘Walkie-Talkie’ skyscraper was built in London. It took millions of pounds to fix a huge issue: the southern wall of the skyscraper was covered with reflective glass that was causing fires and melting cars. Yeah, you read the right—actually melting cars like a heat beam that some comic book villain would use.

We all know that failure’s a part of life and we can’t avoid it forever. So it’s important to learn how to handle it in the right way. Common sense tells us to let things go but that might not be what’s best for us.