A couple months ago I wrote an article about how to avoid allowing a mistake to challenge your sense of self-worth. This month, though, I realized I left something out of that conversation. It focused on the personal benefit of learning to accept that mistakes are a natural part of the learning process. This month, though, I’d like to focus on the practical benefit of accepting that you aren’t perfect – specifically, that doing so will help ensure that you don’t end up making things progressively worse and worse.
Whenever we make a mistake of any kind, we basically have three options. We can accept that things didn’t go the way we thought they would and need to change something in order to avoid a similar situation in the future. We can admit that a mistake occurred but that it happened as the result of things beyond our control (market forces, other people’s actions, etc.) and therefore not our responsibility. Or we can find ways to convince ourselves that our “mistake” actually wasn’t a mistake in the first place.
There is an enormous temptation to engage in the two approaches that don’t require us to admit that we could have done things better or differently than we did. An obvious one is that admitting our role in a problem doesn’t feel very good. But sometimes we worry about the professional implications of admitting a mistake. Politicians are perhaps the best example of this, since it has become quite common to call for the immediate resignation of any politician who admits having made a mistake. If the mistake isn’t my fault, the logic goes, or if I didn’t actually make a mistake in the first place, then I really don’t have anything to worry about.
The only problem with that is it’s a line of thinking that tends to compound our original errors into much larger ones. Doctors have been known to perform unnecessary surgery out of a stubborn insistence that their original diagnosis couldn’t possibly be wrong. Studies have shown that economists whose forecasts end up being incorrect are often more likely to stick with their original predictions rather than analyze why they weren’t correct in the first place. And of course we’ve all seen politicians stick with unpopular or counterproductive policies because they couldn’t bring themselves to admit that their original ideas were lacking in some way.
Of the three options we have when a mistake occurs, the only one that allows us any power over the situation is to admit that things went wrong, analyze why, and then figure out how to keep it from happening again. The other two options – absolving ourselves of responsibility or convincing ourselves that nothing actually went wrong – are based entirely on hoping that the situation doesn’t get any worse. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t; but when things do get worse, it becomes even harder to admit our role in the problem. And that can easily lead to a situation where things are spiraling completely out of control and the only tool we’ve given ourselves is to brace for impact and hope we survive the crash. That’s neither a winning strategy nor a particularly enjoyable one.
It may seem ironic, then, but learning to admit a mistake will actually bring you closer to perfection than pretending you never make mistakes in the first place. It may not always feel good while it’s happening – again, nobody likes making mistakes. But if you ever want to get to a point in your life or career where you can confidently say that you actually know what you’re doing, admitting that you haven’t always gotten it right in the past is the best way to get there.
