Mistakes, everyone makes them.

At one point I grew a handlebar mustache and kept it for a surprisingly long time.

And unfortunately for me, there is a fair bit of photographic evidence of this floating

around out there.

And looking back on these photos, at least in theory, I might learn something and avoid

making that same mistake again.

When my friends who took these photos and can use them as blackmail, might also learn

a lesson, not to make the same mustache mistakes that I did.

Because ideally, we can all learn not only from our own mistakes, but from the mistakes

of others.

That is the hope of Russell Napier, who has dedicated the better part of a decade to promoting

that idea.

The profession with the lowest level of mistakes, probably in the entire world, are pilots.

Because they leave a full record of all the mistakes behind them in a thing called the

black box.

Russell is not a pilot or a man with a handlebar mustache.

He's a financial investment advisor, but he's also the founder and keeper of the library

of mistakes.

You might want to think of the library of mistakes as that kind of giant black box.

I'm Don Therese and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible and wondrous places.

Today, we visit the Library of Mistakes in Edinburgh, Scotland, to browse the card catalog

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