How to make mistakes to your advantage?
Posted: Thu Jan 02, 2025 10:13 am
Learning to learn the right lessons
Contrary to the popular belief that “to err is human,” very often, when we make a mistake or fail, we get upset, angry, feel guilty, scold ourselves, the circumstances, or the environment. These reactions are understandable, natural, and familiar to each of us. But it is also natural that no one is born with the superpower to do any job without making mistakes. If you are a student or a newbie in the office, your mistakes are a learning process. How can you start learning from your mistakes and turn them into a tool for development, rather than a source of negative emotions?
We propose a three-step plan: admit the mistake, analyze, move forward.
1. Admit your mistake and take responsibility.
Try to understand that a mistake is just an event, not a argentina phone number lead characteristic of your personality. It is an indication that at some point something should have been done differently. As soon as you say, “Yes, I made a mistake, the situation did not end as I expected,” you become the master of the situation and no longer waste energy hiding the mistake from yourself and others.
Admitting a mistake is an indicator of your strength, not weakness. You take responsibility and regain control of the situation. If circumstances, the environment, or the actions of other people are to blame, what should you do to correct the mistake? Wait for the circumstances to change or for people to start behaving differently? A much more productive way is to analyze the situation, understand the reasons for the failure, and change your behavior, i.e. act differently next time in a similar situation.
2. Conduct a debriefing.
In the previous point, we agreed that we are not looking for an answer to the question “who is to blame?” Maybe we should figure out what went wrong and when it happened? Of course, yes, but try to conduct such an analysis without emotions, from the standpoint of critical thinking. Do not forget that people tend to fall into the trap of retrospective distortions when they analyze the past. And the most important thing is to focus on the question “What was missing to achieve the result?” Ask yourself or your manager when he criticizes you. It is the answer to this question that will help you formulate a plan of further action, which will become a “road map” on the path to success.
3. Get up and go.
All success stories began with mistakes, failures and even failures. But, apparently, the main thing that characterizes a successful person is the ability to "get up and go" after each mistake, perceiving what happened as a lesson, experience, an opportunity to change yourself and the situation, to take a different path to achieving the goal.
In moments of failure, try to feel like a scientist. Physicists or biologists do not conduct an experiment to get the expected result. They are ready for any result. The information obtained from the experiment is a reason to adjust the initial hypothesis, ask the following questions, change the experimental conditions and get a new result that brings them closer to the goal of the study.
Inventor Thomas Edison is said to have assured a friend that he had learned something after thousands of experiments without solving a problem: "I have successfully identified five thousand ways that will not work. As a result, I am five thousand ways nearer to the way that will work... Sometimes we learn a great deal from our failures if we try our best to come up with the best idea we can."
By allowing ourselves to make mistakes, we develop and expand our personal knowledge and experience. And every mistake becomes a step in the right direction. After all, it is better to make a mistake and know that you tried, than to do nothing because you are afraid of making the wrong step.
Contrary to the popular belief that “to err is human,” very often, when we make a mistake or fail, we get upset, angry, feel guilty, scold ourselves, the circumstances, or the environment. These reactions are understandable, natural, and familiar to each of us. But it is also natural that no one is born with the superpower to do any job without making mistakes. If you are a student or a newbie in the office, your mistakes are a learning process. How can you start learning from your mistakes and turn them into a tool for development, rather than a source of negative emotions?
We propose a three-step plan: admit the mistake, analyze, move forward.
1. Admit your mistake and take responsibility.
Try to understand that a mistake is just an event, not a argentina phone number lead characteristic of your personality. It is an indication that at some point something should have been done differently. As soon as you say, “Yes, I made a mistake, the situation did not end as I expected,” you become the master of the situation and no longer waste energy hiding the mistake from yourself and others.
Admitting a mistake is an indicator of your strength, not weakness. You take responsibility and regain control of the situation. If circumstances, the environment, or the actions of other people are to blame, what should you do to correct the mistake? Wait for the circumstances to change or for people to start behaving differently? A much more productive way is to analyze the situation, understand the reasons for the failure, and change your behavior, i.e. act differently next time in a similar situation.
2. Conduct a debriefing.
In the previous point, we agreed that we are not looking for an answer to the question “who is to blame?” Maybe we should figure out what went wrong and when it happened? Of course, yes, but try to conduct such an analysis without emotions, from the standpoint of critical thinking. Do not forget that people tend to fall into the trap of retrospective distortions when they analyze the past. And the most important thing is to focus on the question “What was missing to achieve the result?” Ask yourself or your manager when he criticizes you. It is the answer to this question that will help you formulate a plan of further action, which will become a “road map” on the path to success.
3. Get up and go.
All success stories began with mistakes, failures and even failures. But, apparently, the main thing that characterizes a successful person is the ability to "get up and go" after each mistake, perceiving what happened as a lesson, experience, an opportunity to change yourself and the situation, to take a different path to achieving the goal.
In moments of failure, try to feel like a scientist. Physicists or biologists do not conduct an experiment to get the expected result. They are ready for any result. The information obtained from the experiment is a reason to adjust the initial hypothesis, ask the following questions, change the experimental conditions and get a new result that brings them closer to the goal of the study.
Inventor Thomas Edison is said to have assured a friend that he had learned something after thousands of experiments without solving a problem: "I have successfully identified five thousand ways that will not work. As a result, I am five thousand ways nearer to the way that will work... Sometimes we learn a great deal from our failures if we try our best to come up with the best idea we can."
By allowing ourselves to make mistakes, we develop and expand our personal knowledge and experience. And every mistake becomes a step in the right direction. After all, it is better to make a mistake and know that you tried, than to do nothing because you are afraid of making the wrong step.