How to Think about Mistakes

Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from. — Al Franken

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When I first joined the faculty at St. John’s College, a senior colleague asked me what classes I was teaching. After I told him, he gave me a sly smile and some great advice: “It’s best if you avoid teaching those classes for the first time.” “So true, Sam!” I laughed. “Any idea how I do that?”

I hate making mistakes, especially when it involves others. Either I’m embarrassed to have others see me messing up, or I’m upset because the mistake means I’ve failed them—whether as a teacher, a therapist, a friend, or writer. In this note I walk through a way of thinking about mistakes that makes them easier to bear. Many patients (including the patient in me) find this perspective helpful, not least because it’s true.

What made Sam’s joke so funny is that it points to our impossible situation. On the one hand, mistakes can be irritating, painful, humiliating, costly, dangerous, harmful, even fatal to us. (In which case, as Franken sagely observed, at least others can learn from it!) No wonder we’re wired to fear mistakes, and to feel bad when we make them. On the other hand, mistakes are inevitable. To avoid them we must also avoid self-awareness, learning, and growth; and few of us are willing to make that trade. So, putting these two hands together, we grasp a fact of life: We’re going to teach that class for the first time, we’re going to make mistakes, and it’s going to pain us.

The question then is, how best to think about mistakes. To get a perspective that helps minimize their negative impact, let me start with an example of a mistake from…earlier today. (I don’t know about you, but I never have to look far.) Here’s the scene: I’m learning a new song on the guitar, and I keep screwing up a chord change. After the third or fourth miss, my gut starts to churn, and I notice a familiar story popping up. It’s inspired by my limbic system, with Shame in a leading role. Here’s an excerpt from the script: ‘This is not hard. What is wrong with you? Anyone else would have it down by now. I don’t know why you even try. What a loser.’

It’s understandable, and even helpful, that making a mistake should irritate me a little. (It’s well-established that pain teaches us faster than pleasure.) But notice my story got existential fast: from messing up a chord change to being a loser in less than a minute. Like many of such stories, the strong negative charge to mine comes from a suppressed, often unconscious premise: that all mistakes are avoidable. Consciously, of course, most of us recognize that the cliché is true: mistakes are part of life. Nevertheless we often react to mistakes (our own and those of others) as if they were always somehow avoidable. This is because we generalize from the fact (and it usually is a fact) that this mistake here was avoidable to the conclusion that all such mistakes are avoidable. Like many logical fallacies, this one owes to our automatic instinctual thinking, which often defaults to all-or-nothing claims.¹

By making a conscious effort to engage our rational minds, we can correct the facts and the story, and reduce our suffering. We can start by noticing that since mistakes inevitably will be made, they must be made somewhere, and here is as likely a place as anywhere else. (The conscious mind knows better than to imagine that because we avoided a mistake that time, we can avoid making it every time.) Thus when I’m practicing with awareness, the script goes more like ‘Ah, damn! Missed it. Hate that! But this is the first song where I’ve come across this chord change. It’ll take some practice but I’ll get it down.’

Thus we can use our good minds to think and feel differently about mistakes. They’re more than a necessary evil, they’re teachers. We can learn to value them as “correct action” when we see the essential part they play in all learning. As Moshe Feldenkrais explains in The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion:

making mistakes is essential to satisfactory learning. During an apprenticeship, mistakes are correct action; they are part of the business. One cannot become a master of any field of human endeavor without the most important item of learning how to do, which is the personal experience of what not to do.

So long as we are learning and growing—and helping others do the same—mistakes are correct action and part of the business. In this light, calling our efforts “good enough” acknowledges our true situation.

1. See Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow for more on the cognitive biases associated with automatic “system 1” thinking.