Learning

I have something against people using the phrase : "Learn it the hard way" and "Learn by making mistakes"
If I were given the option, I would learn things the easy way and by making as few mistakes as possible. Learning by making mistakes and learning the hard way are in my opinion inefficient methods of learning. I am ready to face the fact that learning is not possible without making mistakes, mistaken assumptions, misunderstandings. As I heard a wise old man say.. A man who hasn't made a wrong decesion in his life is one who never made a decesion at all. But there is often this whole ideology, which claims that the hardest way to
learn is the best way to learn and I find this concept wholly absurd and counter intuitive.You do learn from mistakes, but that is not your primary source of learning the way some people look at it.

The way I would like to learn is to look at something I need to learn, find out how much I need to know and find out whats the easiest and most reliable method of gaining a working knowledge so that I can go about the task at hand by doing things right and making as few mistakes as possible.This absurd alternate ideology would have me learn with absolutely no guidance from any reliable source of information. It would have me blunder my way through a task, doing a terrible job at it, spending ten times the amount it should have normally taken and ending up with a mixed up knowledge based purely on experience and not on fact.

I believe that facts must form the basis of any approach to a task and thereafter the experience in performing the specific task will come into play purely because the amount of information required to go beyond a particular level of understanding is too large.The task of sifting through this information would be too time consuming. I wonder from where people form this twisted notion that the best way to learn is by making
mistakes and by doing it the hard way. I think its easier to learn from other people's mistakes and from other people who might have been forced to learn things the hard way due to lack of any well informed sources. I
think the only exception to this would be in learning where creativity and individual thinking is needed.