I
.
It's
never easy to admit you've made a mistake, but it's a crucial step in
learning, growing, and improving yourself. Writer and speaker Scott
Berkun's new essay collection, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds,
examines, among other things, how to learn from your mistakes. In this
excerpt, Berkun discusses four of the most common kinds of mistakes, how
to recognize them, and how, in turn, to learn from them.
You can
only learn from a mistake after you admit you've made it. As soon as you
start blaming other people (or the universe itself), you distance
yourself from any possible lesson. But if you courageously stand up and
honestly say "This is my mistake and I am responsible" the possibilities
for learning will move towards you. Admission of a mistake, even if
only privately to yourself, makes learning possible by moving the focus
away from blame assignment and towards understanding. Wise people admit
their mistakes easily. They know progress accelerates when they do.
This
advice runs counter to the cultural assumptions we have about mistakes
and failure, namely that they are shameful things. We're taught in
school, in our families, or at work to feel guilty about failure and to
do whatever we can to avoid mistakes. This sense of shame combined with
the inevitability of setbacks when attempting difficult things explains
why many people give up on their goals: they're not prepared for the
mistakes and failures they'll face on their way to what they want.
What's missing in many people's beliefs about success is the fact that
the more challenging the goal, the more frequent and difficult setbacks
will be. The larger your ambitions, the more dependent you will be on
your ability to overcome and learn from your mistakes.
But for
many reasons admitting mistakes is difficult. An implied value in many
cultures is that our work represents us: if you fail a test, then you
are a failure. If you make a mistake then you are a mistake (You may
never have felt this way, but many people do. It explains the behavior
of some of your high school or college friends). Like eggs, steak and
other tasty things we are given letter grades (A, B, C, D and F)
organizing us for someone else's consumption: universities and employers
evaluate young candidates on their grades, numbers based on scores from
tests unforgiving to mistakes.
For anyone who never discovers a deeper self-identity, based not on lack
of mistakes but on courage, compassionate intelligence, commitment and
creativity, life is a scary place made safe only by never getting into
trouble, never breaking rules and never taking the risks that their
hearts tell them they need to take.
Learning from mistakes requires three things:
Putting yourself in situations where you can make interesting mistakes
Having the self-confidence to admit to them
Being courageous about making changes
This essay will cover all three. First we have to classify the different kinds of mistakes.
The Four Kinds of Mistakes
One way to categorize mistakes is into these categories:
- Stupid:
Absurdly dumb things that just happen. Stubbing your toe, dropping your
pizza on your neighbor's fat cat or poking yourself in the eye with a
banana.
- Simple:
Mistakes that are avoidable but your sequence of decisions made
inevitable. Having the power go out in the middle of your party because
you forgot to pay the rent, or running out of beer at said party because
you didn't anticipate the number of guests.
- Involved:
Mistakes that are understood but require effort to prevent. Regularly
arriving late to work/friends, eating fast food for lunch every day, or
going bankrupt at your start-up company because of your complete
ignorance of basic accounting.
- Complex:
Mistakes that have complicated causes and no obvious way to avoid next
time. Examples include making tough decisions that have bad results,
relationships that fail, or other unpleasant or unsatisfying outcomes to
important things.
(I'm sure you can come up with other categories: that's fantastic, please
share them here. But these are the ones you're stuck with for the rest of this essay).
I'm
leaving all philosophical questions about mistakes up to you. One
person's pleasure is another person's mistake: decide for yourself.
Maybe you enjoy stabbing your neighbor's cat with a banana, who knows.
We all do things we know are bad in the long term, but are oh so good in
the short term. So regardless of where you stand, I'm working with you.
However mistakes are defined in your personal philosophy this essay
should help you learn from them.
Learning
from mistakes that fall into the first two categories (Stupid &
Simple) is easy, but shallow. Once you recognize the problem and know
the better way, you should be able to avoid similar mistakes. Or in some
cases you'll realize that no matter what you do once in a while you'll
do stupid things (e.g. even Einstein stubbed his toes).
But these
kinds of mistakes are not interesting. The lessons aren't deep and it's
unlikely they lead you to learn much about yourself or anything else.
For example compare these two mistakes:
- My use
of dual part harmony for the 2nd trumpets in my orchestral composition
for the homeless children's shelter benefit concert overpowered the
intended narrative of the violins.
- I got an Oreo stuck in my underwear.
The kind of mistakes you make define you. The more interesting the
mistakes, the more interesting the life. If your biggest mistakes are
missing reruns of tv-shows or buying the wrong lottery ticket you're not
challenging yourself enough to earn more interesting mistakes.
And since
there isn't much to learn from simple and stupid mistakes, most people
try to minimize their frequency and how much time we spend recovering
from them. Their time is better spent learning from bigger mistakes. But
if we habitually or compulsively make stupid mistakes, then what we
really have is an involved mistake.
Involved Mistakes
The
third pile of mistakes, Involved mistakes, requires significant changes
to avoid. These are mistakes we tend to make through either habit or
nature. But since change is so much harder than we admit, we often
suffer through the same mistakes again and again instead of making the
tough changes needed to avoid them.
Difficultly
with change involves an earlier point made in this essay. Some feel
that to agree to change means there is something wrong with them. "If
I'm perfect, why would I need to change?" Since they need to protect
their idea of perfection, they refuse change (Or possibly, even refuse
to admit they did anything wrong).
But this is a trap: refusing to acknowledge mistakes, or tendencies to
make similar kinds of mistakes, is a refusal to acknowledge reality. If
you can't see the gaps, flaws, or weaknesses in your behavior you're
forever trapped in the same behavior and limitations you've always had,
possibly since you were a child (When someone tells you you're being a
baby, they might be right).
Another
challenge to change is that it may require renewing commitments you've
broken before, from the trivial "Yes, I'll try to remember to take the
trash out" to the more serious "I'll try to stop sleeping with all of
your friends". This happens in any environment: the workplace,
friendships, romantic relationships or even commitments you've made to
yourself. Renewing commitments can be tough since it requires not only
admitting to the recent mistake, but acknowledging similar mistakes
you've made before. The feelings of failure and guilt become so large
that we don't have the courage to try again.
This is why
success in learning from mistakes often requires involvement from other
people, either for advice, training or simply to keep you honest. A
supportive friend's, mentor's or professional's perspective on your
behavior will be more objective than your own and help you identify when
you're hedging, breaking or denying the commitments you've made.
In moments
of weakness the only way to prevent a mistake is to enlist someone else.
"Fred, I want to play my Gamecube today but I promised Sally I
wouldn't. Can we hang out so you can make sure I don't do it today?"
Admitting you need help and asking for it often requires more courage
than trying to do it on your own.
The biggest
lesson to learn in involved mistakes is that you have to examine your
own ability to change. Some kinds of change will be easier for you than
others and until you make mistakes and try to correct them you won't
know which they are.
How to Handle Complex Mistakes
The
most interesting kinds of mistake are the last group: Complex mistakes.
The more complicated the mistake you've made, the more patient you need
to be. There's nothing worse than flailing around trying to fix
something you don't understand: you'll always make things worse.
I remember
as a kid when our beloved Atari 2600 game system started showing static
on the screen during games. The solution my brother and I came up with?
Smack the machine as hard as we could (A clear sign I had the intellect
for management). Amazingly this worked for awhile, but after weeks of
regular beatings the delicate electronics eventually gave out. We were
lazy, ignorant and impatient, and couldn't see that our solution would
work against us.
Professional
investigators, like journalists, police detectives and doctors, try to
get as many perspectives on situations as possible before taking action
(Policemen use eyewitnesses, Doctors use exams and tests, scientific
studies use large sample sizes). They know that human perception,
including their own, is highly fallible and biased by many factors. The
only way to obtain an objective understanding is to compare several
different perspectives. When trying to understand your own mistakes in
complex situations you should work in the same way.
Start by
finding someone else to talk to about what happened. Even if no one was
within 50 yards when you crashed your best friend's BMW into your
neighbor's living room, talking to someone else gives you the benefit of
their experience applied to your situation. They may know of someone
that's made a similar mistake or know a way to deal with the problem
that you don't.
But most
importantly, by describing what happened you are forced to break down
the chronology and clearly define (your recollection of) the sequence of
events. They may ask you questions that surface important details you
didn't notice before. There may have been more going on (did the brakes
fail? Did you swerve to avoid your neighbor's daughter? etc.) than you,
consumed by your emotions about your failure, realized.
If multiple
people were involved (say, your co-workers), you want to hear each
person's account of what happened. Each person will emphasize different
aspects of the situation based on their skills, biases, and
circumstances, getting you closer to a complete view of what took place.
If the
situation was/is contentious you may need people to report their stories
independently – police investigators never have eyewitness collaborate.
They want each point of view to be delivered unbiased by other
eyewitnesses (possibly erroneous) recollections. Later on they'll bring
each account together and see what fits and what doesn't.
An illustrative example comes from the book
Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the edge of technology.
It tells the story of a floating dormitory for oil workers in the North
Sea that rolled over during the night killing over 100 people. The
engineering experts quickly constructed different theories and complex
explanations that focused on operational errors and management
decisions.
All of
these theories were wrong. It was eventually discovered through careful
analysis that weeks earlier a crack in a support structure had been
painted over, instead of being reported and repaired. This stupid,
simple and small mistake caused the superstructure to fail, sinking the
dormitory. Without careful analysis the wrong conclusion would have been
reached (e.g. smacking the Atari) and the wrong lesson would have been
learned.
Until you
work backwards for moments, hours or days before the actual mistake
event, you probably won't see all of the contributing factors and can't
learn all of the possible lessons. The more complex the mistake, the
further back you'll need to go and the more careful and open-minded you
need to be in your own investigation. You may even need to bring in an
objective outsider to help sort things out. You'd never have a suspect
in a crime lead the investigation, right? Then how can you completely
trust yourself to investigate your own mistakes?
Here some questions to ask to help your investigation:
- What was the probable sequence of events?
- Were their multiple small mistakes that led to a larger one?
- Were there any erroneous assumptions made?
- Did we have the right goals? Were we trying to solve the right problem?
- Was it possible to have recognized bad assumptions earlier?
- Was there information we know now that would have been useful then?
- What would we do differently if in this exact situation again?
- How can we avoid getting into situations like this? (What was the kind of situation we wanted to be in?)
- Was this simply unavoidable given all of the circumstances? A failure isn't a mistake if you were attempting the impossible.
- Has enough time passed for us to know if this is a mistake or not?
As you put together the sequence of events, you'll recognize that
mistakes initially categorized as complex eventually break down into
smaller mistakes. The painted over crack was avoidable but happened
anyway (Stupid). Was there a system in place for avoiding these
mistakes? (Simple). Were there unaddressed patterns of behavior that
made that system fail? (Involved). Once you've broken a complex mistake
down you can follow the previous advice on making changes.
Humor and Courage
No amount
of analysis can replace your confidence in yourself. When you've made a
mistake, especially a visible one that impacts other people, it's
natural to question your ability to perform next time. But you must get
past your doubts. The best you can do is study the past, practice for
the situations you expect, and get back in the game. Your studying of
the past should help broaden your perspective. You want to be aware of
how many other smart, capable well meaning people have made similar
mistakes to the one you made, and went on to even bigger mistakes, I
mean successes, in the future.
One way to
know you've reached a healthy place is your sense of humor. It might
take a few days, but eventually you'll see some comedy in what happened.
When friends tell stories of their mistakes it makes you laugh, right?
Well when you can laugh at your own mistakes you know you've accepted it
and no longer judge yourself on the basis of one single event. Reaching
this kind of perspective is very important in avoiding future mistakes.
Humor loosens up your psychology and prevents you from obsessing about
the past. It's easy to make new mistakes by spending too much energy
protecting against the previous ones. Remember the saying "a man fears
the tiger that bit him last, instead of the tiger that will bite him
next".
So the most
important lesson in all of mistake making is to trust that while
mistakes are inevitable, if you can learn from the current one, you'll
also be able to learn from future ones. No matter when happens tomorrow
you'll be able to get value from it, and apply it to the day after that.
Progress won't be a straight line but if you keep learning you will
have more successes than failures, and the mistakes you make along the
way will help you get to where you want to go.
The Learning From Mistakes Checklist
- Accepting responsibility makes learning possible.
- Don't equate making mistakes with being a mistake.
- You can't change mistakes, but you can choose how to respond to them.
- Growth starts when you can see room for improvement.
- Work to understand why it happened and what the factors were.
- What information could have avoided the mistake?
- What small mistakes, in sequence, contributed to the bigger mistake?
- Are there alternatives you should have considered but did not?
- What kinds of changes are required to avoid making this mistake again?What kinds of change are difficult for you?
- How do you think your behavior should/would change in you were in a similar situation again?
- Work to understand the mistake until you can make fun of it (or not want to kill others that make fun).
- Don't over-compensate: the next situation won't be the same as the last.
Have questions or opinions? Make no mistake,
the forums are for you.
- http://lifehacker.com/5863490/how-to-learn-from-your-mistakes
1. Spend time around positive people
