HOW TO IDENTIFY AND LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES
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.
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
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).
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.
Scott Berkun http://lifehacker.com/5863490/how-to-learn-from-your-mistakes
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