How to Handle Mistakes & 5 Lessons From being Wrong
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Here are some great ideas to help you improve this week..
Today at a Glance:
- How to Handle Mistakes.
- 5 Lessons from Being Wrong
How to Handle Mistakes
Mistakes are an unavoidable part of life. Even the most skilled people make mistakes, because there are so many factors beyond our knowledge and control that impact our success. This is true especially when we’re pushing the boundaries of knowledge or potential. On the frontier of what we can know or do, there are no wagon tracks to follow, no familiar landmarks, no mile markers, no road maps to guide us. We’re moving forward without the benefit of anyone else’s hindsight. Missteps will happen. Part of taking command of our lives is managing those missteps when they do happen.
When things don’t work out the way we’d like, most of us default to blaming the world rather than ourselves. This is a form of what psychologists call self-serving bias: a tendency to evaluate things in ways that protect or enhance our self-image. When people succeed at something, they tend to attribute their success to their own ability or effort: “I’m really smart”; “I worked really hard”; “I knew all the angles.” By contrast, when people fail at something, they tend to attribute their failure to external factors: “My boss doesn’t like me,” “The test was unfair,” etc.
In other words, “Heads, I’m right. Tails, I’m not wrong.”
If you got some results you didn’t want, the world is telling you at least one of two things:
(a) you were unlucky;
(b) your ideas about how things work were wrong.
If you were unlucky, trying again with the same approach should lead to a different outcome. When you repeatedly don’t get the outcomes you want, though, the world is telling you to update your understanding.
Many people don’t want to hear that their ideas are wrong. They don’t want to be conscious of the flaws in their thinking and would prefer instead to sleepwalk through life. They do this in part because recognizing that their ideas are wrong is a blow to their self-image: it’s proof that they’re not as smart or knowledgeable as they’ve believed themselves to be.
If you want to see whether your thinking is wrong, you need to make it visible. Making what was previously invisible visible gives us the best chance of seeing what we knew and what we thought at the time we made a decision. Relying on memory won’t work because the ego distorts information to make us look better than we actually were.
Once you realize that it’s time to update your ideas, though, changing what you believe about the world requires a lot of work. So people tend to ignore what the world is trying to tell them. They keep doing what they’ve always done and keep getting the same results.
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.
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.
Step 1: Accept Responsibility
If you’ve taken command of your life, you need to acknowledge any contribution you’ve made to a mistake and take responsibility for what happens afterward. Even if the mistake isn’t entirely your fault, it’s still your problem, and you still have a role to play in handling it.
Step 2: Learn from the Mistake
Take time to reflect on what you contributed to the mistake, by exploring the various thoughts, feelings, and actions that got you here. If it’s an emergency, and you don’t have time to reflect at the moment, be sure to come back to it. If you don’t identify the problem’s causes, after all, you can’t fix them. And if you can’t fix them, you can’t do better in the future. Instead, you’ll be doomed to repeat the same mistake over and over.
If you reach this stage and you find yourself blaming other people or saying things like, “This isn’t fair!” or “Why did this happen to me?” then you haven’t accepted responsibility for the mistake. You need to go back to Step 1.
Step 3: Commit to Doing Better
Formulate a plan for doing better in the future. It could be a matter of building a strength like greater self-accountability or greater self-confidence. Or it could be a matter of installing a safeguard like seeing things from other people’s points of view. Either way, you need to make a plan for doing better in the future, and follow through on that plan. Only then will you be able to change how you do things, and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Step 4: Repair the Damage as Best You Can
Most times it’s possible to repair the damage caused by a mistake. The longer your relationship with a person and the more consistent your behavior has been, the easier it is to repair. That doesn’t mean it happens instantly, though. Just as it takes a while for a wound to heal, it takes a while for a relationship to heal. It’s not enough to accept the impact of your behavior and sincerely apologize. You need to be consistent in doing better going forward. Any immediate deviation quickly reverses any repair.
Not all mistakes are like this. Some mistakes have consequences that are irreversible. The key here is not letting a bad situation become a worse situation.
Mistakes turn into anchors if you don’t accept them. Part of accepting them is learning from them and then letting them go. We can’t change the past, but we can work to undo the effects it’s had on the future.
The most powerful story in the world is the one you tell yourself. That inner voice has the power to move you forward or anchor you to the past. Choose wisely.
5 Lessons from Being Wrong
Being wrong is part of the process—and it’s not nearly as bad as we make it out to be. Here are five key lessons I’ve learned from my own mistakes:
- Poor choices in hindsight reflect growth, not failure. When you look back at decisions you made a year ago and cringe, it’s a good sign. It means you’ve grown. If you’re only making “safe” choices that you know you can’t get wrong, you’re staying in the comfort zone. Growth comes from challenging yourself.
- Your first move is probably wrong—start anyway. The faster you’re wrong, the quicker you learn. Whether it’s relationships or business, you can’t wait to feel “ready.” You learn by doing, by making mistakes, and by adjusting.
- Focus on what you can master. Big topics are overwhelming. You can’t master “entrepreneurship,” but you can nail down optimizing a website for email conversions. Break big goals into smaller, manageable pieces—this is where expertise is built.
- Trust your gut—when you’ve earned it. Once you’ve put in the reps and gained real experience, you can trust your instincts. For everything else, keep experimenting. Gut feelings are only reliable when backed by knowledge.
- Failure isn’t a free pass to expect failure. Mistakes will happen, but that’s no reason to lower your expectations. Give it your all every time, because even when you fail, the effort leads to learning and progress. Expect to win, and play to win.
Your first choice won’t be perfect, but it will be the first step to growth. Make it, learn from it, and move forward.
If this helped you today, don’t keep it to yourself—share it with a friend who could benefit from it too!
