If you do not make mistakes, you are not trying hard enough! If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes. (John Wooden) I recently saw an interview of Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx (a multi-million dollar undergarment company). She said her Dad asked her every day what mistakes she made. He celebrated her mistakes!
Celebrate your mistakes
What if we celebrated our mistakes and did nothing when we succeeded? Have you ever thought about celebrating your mistakes? Apparently, Sara Blakely’s father did! I can see the wisdom in celebrating mistakes because it encourages trying. You know making an effort no matter the results. I often see some of my students stop trying. So it is very important to keep trying, particularly when you fail. Failing is only failure when you are satisfied with the results.
It reminds me of football games in high school. If you gave up, you were out of the game. The coach had no tolerance for players who did not try. Sports and games can teach us lessons for life. When you stop trying, you gave up. What does that say about you? Are you satisfied with the results? Did you make your best effort and fail? There is no shame in that! Usually, it is not true. You can always reassess and change your efforts.
It is one of the purposes of monitoring your progress. If you are working toward a goal of saving for something, you should have a weekly objective. If you did not reach it, you have to find out why and increase your effort so you do not fall behind in your goal. Mistakes are not bad, if you learn from them. A mistake is an error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge or carelessness. Einstein said, “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
Learn from your mistakes
I think it is the heart of making mistakes to try new things and not worry about making mistakes. Have you tried something new today? If you are not making mistakes, you are not growing personally or professionally. Remember, I am not talking about making big financial, personal or professional mistakes! I am suggesting stepping out of your comfort zone and trying new things. It may be looking at things differently or trying or just taking calculated risks. I know some of you take investing risks!
Are all your investments guaranteed winners? I reserve a portion of my portfolio for calculated risks. I invest in up and coming stocks on occasion versus the blue chips, dividend or triple A stocks. The payoff can be big or not. They are calculated risks using a modest amount of money. Years ago, I invested in a biotech that eventually became a powerhouse. There have been others with varying results. All the winners won big and the losers were small losses. Was it worth it? Absolutely!
Remember, mistakes are an error in judgment! How do you improve your judgment? It is simple; you have to make more decisions. One of the things I did with my children was giving them lots of opportunities to make decisions. It started early by giving them choices. It may have been a choice of toys, clothes to wear that day or what story to read them. At three or four years old, you have to start small. Sometimes choices had consequences too.
Making mistakes is part of learning how to make better decisions. It is a good reason to celebrate mistakes because you will learn from your mistakes. It is the start of making better decisions! Starting with small decisions in a controlled environment is a good way to practice making decisions. The more decisions you make, you naturally will improve your judgment.
Final thoughts
Making mistakes should be celebrated because you are trying to do things. You cannot make mistakes unless you are doing something. It reminds me of the movie, Rudy. It is about a young man who was too small to play Notre Dame Football, but he was determined to overcome the odds. He made mistakes, but stuck with it and eventually played in a Notre Dame game. It really is a tribute to the impossible and this young man was able to accomplish it by just trying. What mistakes did you make today?
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Rudy! Fantastic.
I’m a big fan of making mistakes. That means that I’m finally moving fast enough. I was telling my team about the power of mistakes when one woman told me I was wrong. We should be pushing for zero mistakes (and she was my employee!). I replied that while zero errors is great, making mistakes is a way to learn. Plus, I’d rather be the first one to give our client info and be 98% right than be the advisor who’s 100% right and takes forever to respond. She still didn’t understand and didn’t last long with us.
No one is ever 100% unless they only make safe decisions. Making mistakes is part of growth.
I don’t think I’ve made any mistakes yet today, it is early, but I know I’ve made a ton of mistakes. I definitely try to learn from them, but some mistakes you don’t realize are mistakes until way after the fact!
Making mistakes is just part of growing and learning! Mistakes usually occurs when you test your limits or try new things.
It had never occurred to me to “celebrate” my mistakes. The moment I read this sentence, a smile came across my face and my stress melted away. Thankyou for writing and sharing this story!
You’re welcome! When I heard it in the interview it just made so much sense because you should test your limits.
This is a really great message. I’ve had a problem for a while with being too afraid of making mistakes and letting that hold me back from trying new things. I’m working on that.
One thing that can be difficult is differentiating between a mistake and something that just didn’t work out. You can make a great decision based on a lot of good reasoning and still see it fail, but that doesn’t mean it was a mistake. But either way, we grow by trying and learning from the consequences.
Decision making has a lot of choices! making a choice that does not work out is considered a mistake. You can adjust quite easily by making better choices.
I make so many mistakes that it blows my mind sometimes…but I just keep moving forward. That’s all that anyone can do really.
We all make mistakes, hopefully minor ones or correctable ones. If you are doing anything new, you will make mistakes.
I welcome mistakes because it is the only way I can learn and grow. The key is to not make the same mistake twice. I have learned so much from mistakes and I don’t shy away from making them.
Mistakes should be a part of your life because you should not just do the things you already know. Mistakes usually occurs when you are doing something new and you should try new things all the time.
Loved the post and the message. Thank you. It’s uplifting to recognize that growth follows from mistakes. We all just need to do a better job of learning from them. It’s key to develop a systematic approach to your efforts – so that you be proud of failed efforts like Edison’s – where he noted “I have found 2,000 ways NOT to make the light bulb.”
It is always interesting how we find these kinds of quotes from successful people. I think we need to study successful people to learn their “secrets.” I use to read about famous successful people when I was young loking for insight.
Sara Blakely is one of my heroes. You have to love someone who became a billionaire by reinventing the girdle! I could certainly have a big party if we were celebrating mistakes. However, fixing mistakes and making the results even better because of the mistake is amazing, and I would not be where I am today if everything had always gone perfectly.
heroes!
Sometimes mistakes are necessary to see, if you can catch them! I missed it the first time. 🙂
I agree! We are the sum of our experiences, mistakes included.
In every interview, I ask a question of applicants – tell me about a time you made a mistake. And what is surprising is about 60% of applicants answer with, “I never make mistakes”. Guess what – I’ll never hire you. It’s important to make mistakes, but more important to learn from them!
Mistakes are important and I wrote this article to place emphasis on making mistakes. Learning from your mistakes is important, but trying new things is equally important.
I LOVE MISTAKES! I mean, they don’t feel that great, and sometimes they are hard to deal with, but they teach things in a way you could not learn otherwise. 100% wholeheartedly agree with you here!
We should celebrate mistakes it means we are trying new things.
Everyone has made a few mistakes in their life. If they say they haven’t, then they are clearly lying through their teeth. I’ve made mistakes on tests, with money, answering interview questions, in jobs, in relationships and the list goes on. I try not to let all my mistakes get to me.
I am suggesting to make more mistakes because you should get out of your comfort zone and try new things. Let’s celebrate mistakes!
Celebrating mistakes, what a concept! My parents scrutinized my exam misses more than a good grade. Now that I am a father, I want to celebrate my son’s mistakes, but I don’t want to go too far so my son becomes careless. Fine line here. Thanks for the pep talk. Time to make some mistakes today!
Don’t misunderstand! Don’t celebrate when you child makes mistakes on a test or bad grades. I am suggesting celebrating trying although you may fail.
Wise words KC! As a Science Teacher I try to teach my students that many discoveries are made by trial and error. Often we learn more by our mistakes than our successes!
I agree, science teaches us to experiment and use a process vs. random choice. Making mistakes teach us much more than success.