Learn from your Mistakes

Learning from mistakes requires three things:

1. Putting yourself in situations where you can make interesting mistakes
2. Having the self-confidence to admit to them
3. Being courageous about making changes

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The four kinds of mistakes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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The learning from mistakes checklist

1. Accepting responsibility makes learning possible.
2. Don’t equate making mistakes with being a mistake.
3. You can’t change mistakes, but you can choose how to respond to them.
4. Growth starts when you can see room for improvement.
5. Work to understand why it happened and what the factors were.
6. What information could have avoided the mistake?
7. What small mistakes, in sequence, contributed to the bigger mistake?
8. Are there alternatives you should have considered but did not?
9. What kinds of changes are required to avoid making this mistake again? What kinds of change are difficult for you?
10. How do you think you behavior should/would change in you were in a similar situation again?
11. Work to understand the mistake until you can make fun of it (or not want to kill others that make fun).
12. Don’t over-compensate: the next situation won’t be the same as the last.

Scott Berkun, How to learn from your mistakes - July 17 2005