How to learn from experiences

This topic deserves a bit more exposition. I cannot recommend too highly the attitude expressed by the phrase: "I win or I learn," in your learning endeavors. This is considered extreme because of the social expectations around "saving face" in most Terran societies. You really have to take an attitude that public failure makes you stronger - haters and gawkers be damned.

In education there is a term called the "zone of proximal development", and it refers to the optimal situation for learning. Imagine everything you know as a bubble that grows larger every time you learn something new. Thus, the center of the bubble represents the things you've known all your life, and near the rim is your most recently acquired knowledge and skills. To learn best, you need to be exposed to something that lies halfway within your bubble and halfway outside of it, so that you can connect new experiences with already known facts and build upon that knowledge base. That area is the zone of proximal development and failure is one of its more common names.

Another analogy for this strategy is weightlifting. If you can bench 250, you need to start your next set at 255 to keep improving. It is indeed by going out of your way to get in over your head that you can accelerate you language learning and also level up as a lifelong learner, to boot!