Mistakes Present Us with a Choice
Mistakes offer a critical juncture: either update your beliefs and behaviors or cover up and persist in error. Effectively handling mistakes involves accepting responsibility, learning, committing to improvement, and repairing damage.
THE IDEA
Mistakes Present Us with a Choice
As with anything else, there are better and worse ways of handling mistakes. The world doesn’t stop just because you made a mistake. Life goes on, and you need to go on too. You can’t simply throw your hands up and walk away. There are other decisions to make, other things to accomplish, and hopefully you won’t repeat that kind of mistake in the future.
Everyone makes mistakes because everyone has limitations. Even you. Trying to avoid responsibility for your decisions, your actions, or their outcomes, though, is tantamount to pretending you don’t have limitations. One thing that sets exceptional people apart from the crowd is how they handle mistakes and whether they learn from them and do better as a result.
Mistakes present a choice: whether to update your ideas, or ignore the failures they’ve produced and keep believing what you’ve always believed. More than a few of us choose the latter.
The biggest mistake people make typically isn’t their initial mistake. It’s the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it. The first mistake is expensive; the second one costs a fortune.
My kids learned this the hard way. One day, I came home to find a weird piece of broken glass on the floor. I held it up and asked what had happened, and they pleaded ignorance. When I opened the garbage, though, and moved a sheet of paper that seemed to have been carefully placed on top, I found the remains of a shattered vase. I gave my kids one final opportunity to change their story. With all the confidence preteens could muster, they stuck to it. When the consequences came, it wasn’t for breaking the vase, it was for lying.
There are three problems with covering up mistakes. The first is that you can’t learn if you ignore your mistakes. The second is that hiding them becomes a habit. The third is that the cover-up makes a bad situation worse.
Admitting error and correcting course is a time-saver that empowers you to avoid making more mistakes in the future. However, mistakes also provide rare opportunities for getting closer to the kind of person you want to be, should you choose to heed their lessons. Use those opportunities wisely! Don’t squander them.
The four steps to handling mistakes more effectively are as follows: (1) accept responsibility, (2) learn from the mistake, (3) commit to doing better, and (4) repair the damage as best you can.
When to use it
In a corporate setting, a team leader realizes a flawed strategy caused a missed quarterly target. Instead of shifting blame, they openly acknowledge the error, hold a lessons-learned meeting, and implement new review processes.
A doctor prescribes the wrong medication but catches it before harm. She informs the patient, apologizes, reports the incident for systemic improvement, and takes a refresher course to prevent future errors.
A student is caught plagiarizing. He admits it, accepts the failing grade, learns proper citation, and volunteers to educate peers about academic integrity.
An investor makes a poor stock pick that loses money. Instead of hiding it from their clients, they transparently explain the reasoning, what they learned, and adjust their investment criteria.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
The Broken Vase
The author's children broke a vase and lied about it. When the author found the shattered vase in the garbage, the children stuck to their lie. The consequence was not just for breaking the vase, but for lying. Covering up a mistake can be worse than the mistake itself.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
Recall a recent mistake: did you accept responsibility or try to cover it up? What motivated that choice?
How can you apply the four steps (accept, learn, commit, repair) to a mistake you are currently dealing with?
What would change in your life if you viewed every mistake as an opportunity to update your beliefs and become a better person?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Clear Thinking Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results (Shane Parrish)