Supposedly Albert Einstein recommended we all make nine mistakes a day, so as to live a life of learning. The teacher who shared this admitted he felt three was sufficient to get the point. We all laughed. The laughter and recognition in ourselves of our own mistake-making was a great way to diffuse any tension mistakes seem to generate in people.
What is that tension? I feel it. I worry for the mistakes of others. And I definitely sweat my own. Gina developed a workbook, an inquiry into scarcity (it will be available soon), and there is a chapter on Failure. This is a particular demon for me, and for our culture where we are conditioned to deflect blame. The workbook asks: Do I let the prospect of failure prevent me from bold moves? Yes, I answer. I would rather not play than fail; and where does that leave me? During the years when I lived inside this credo, I resisted falling in love, I stalled my career development, I literally hid, right in plain sight, engaging in behaviors that ensured I would not fail, not experience the physical and emotional tension that arises when expectations are not met.
I mourn those years now. And though I am not a champion of mistakes, with a lot of help and support, I have discovered that making mistakes are a portal into some kind of learning, hard lessons and softer ones. Either way, effectively recovering from them and integrating their lessons – if there are any, requires tools and skills that are, indeed, learnable. For any perfectionists, the first skill is humility; I think this is what Einstein was hoping we’d get. If we all walked around saying “I know that already”, how would any new information get through? Saying I don’t know, or I tried that and it failed, or I did what I thought was right, but it wasn’t, or the worst, I did this and I just messed up – would completely deny our humanity. So much of life is trial and error. It’s a vast experiment, rich with possibility that we can only see if we loosen our grip on ‘getting it right’ the first time.
There is a lot of research that supports this assertion. And there is a lot of evidence that we live in a culture where mistakes are demonfied, and making them feels threatening to the mistake-maker and stakeholders. I have been making a lot of mistakes lately: wrong dates on emails to over a thousand people, not fully being explicit in my communication, forgetting steps in simple tasks. This adds up to time and resources being spent on fixing these mistakes. The learning here as far as I can see: slow down.
There are other kinds of mistakes like last year’s BP oil rig explosion, born inside scarcity, where a corporate culture was resisting responsible safety protocol to save money and time. Mistakes that claim lives are difficult to make sense of and still they require deep analysis to learn from and prevent the preventable. Imagine then a world where we celebrated the conversations, the process of rethinking of systems and plans, or the opportunity to recognize a new trait or skill developing in light of a breakdown required to clean up a mistake.