I concede that sometimes we may make wrong decisions only relied on the history, however, one cannot deny that the extant and close links between the old and new events may lead us to think and act more considerately. If we can learn more information about the past and rationally analysis the present situation, some experience from success and lessons from failure will be useful for us to make important choices or decisions.
Events happened in the past might different from present events for the changes of time and space. Sometimes we are not able to evaluate the points of history appropriately since that may be too old for us to understand all the details. In addition, we may also be confused by current situations in which we are involved. Using the past experience to deal with current things without any change or prudent consideration, a person would make some inadvisable decisions. Take one's determination about studying abroad for an example. If a student decide to study abroad only for the previous success of his or her friends who have studied abroad, they may be failed to compare his or her own conditions with the others', such as the ability of learning, the family economic levels and their future working plans related to their major. Thus, their reckless decisions about going abroad may be irresponsible for themselves as well as their families.
In fact, we can also see many successful current decisions that are all based on the lessons from reviewing past events. Apple company, for example, had some unsuccessful products in its early competition with other companies, such as Microsoft and IBM, despite its current popularity all over the world. Today's success can be mostly attributed to the leader's changing of the management systems and reducing of the costs of their amazing products, and such improved decisions are based on their objectively facing their previous failure and preventing it when deciding the current marketing strategy. Additionally, we can learn about the history and ancient events according to movies, books and mass medias to make us familiar with them. We may not aware that many good habits and customs we have today are influenced by previous people or ideas. A good example is that we share strong concentrations on our families and communities, which is inherited from Confucianism.
In order to avoid lopsidedness when we decide according to the past experience, we need to be objective and rational to regard current things as if we stand at the point which have distance from both the past and the present. The Art of War, a very famous book about battle strategies in ancient China, is a very useful direction for leaders to learn how to fight with wisdom. Although today there are less wars than before, these valuable principles in the book can also be extended to our daily life to deal with complicated matters in political and business world. And one can make full use of the old techniques on fights in their current life or work only after they are clear about the differences and similarities between their own situation and the past one. If not so, applying previous methods to present conditions may be somewhat dangerous.
In a nutshell, based on the above discussions, I draw the conclusion that whether an ancient event can be used by us to deal with our present problems is based on our objectivity and rationality when considering complex situations. The idea that fully repudiates the importance of history on our decision making turns out to be unreasonable. If we can learn more information about the past and rationally analysis the present situation, the past things may become very useful directions for us to decide our choices.