Mistakes

For many years now, I’ve happily trotted out the cliches about learning from your mistakes. I’ve encouraged others not to beat themselves up over their mistakes, but rather to recognise the learning and how it allows them to move forward more strongly and positively. And I’ve genuinely meant it.

Have I been able to embrace my own mistakes in this way, though? Erm, not so much.

This, I suspect, is one of the few areas in which I can claim to be normal. Surely most of us shy away from the idea of making mistakes? However much we may rationally appreciate their potential value, we don’t actually want to have them happen to us, do we? It doesn’t help that, on the rare occasions when people in the public eye make that admission, there is usually way more focus on the mistake, the awfulness of it (and of the person who made it), and its consequences than on what anyone might be learning.

Now that I’m thinking about it, though, admitting to my mistakes in day to day life has generally not been that harrowing. Perhaps it’s because my tendency to overwhelm everyone with guilt-ridden apologies makes them want to just say and do whatever it takes to make me shut up and go away? Whatever it is, it’s felt like a more beneficial approach than lying (whether proactively or by omission) and living in dread of being caught out. But that’s not really the same as valuing the mistake because of what I can learn from it, is it?

Of course, the nature and impact of the mistake also affect how we feel about admitting to it and embracing the learning experience. Realising you’re using the wrong colour paint to touch up the hall wall is somewhat different to realising that you should never have married your partner, for instance.

But I digress – usually, a lot. To summarise my temporarily abandoned point: I recognise that mistakes are learning experiences; I love learning; I don’t want to make mistakes. I’m aware that this seems contradictory, but I think it’s probably just human.

Recently, I have made a little breakthrough in my attitude to mistakes, though. I’ve been playing sudoku on an app on my phone. This app tells you when you’ve made a mistake (not out of the kindness of its programmed little heart, in case you were wondering, but because it will force you to watch an advert if you want to continue after three mistakes). Sometimes when I check a mistake, I realise that I’d missed the only other possible number it could be: this means that I now know the correct answer.

What I used to do was make a note of both the correct and incorrect numbers in the square and continue to work it all out as if I hadn’t just got the answer. It felt that it was somehow cheating to use the knowledge I gained from a mistake, that solving the puzzle would have less value if it were based on a mistake.

A couple of days ago, after being alerted that the 9 I’d just put in was wrong, I realised that I’d failed to spot that a 3 was the other possibility. So the answer had to be 3. I was about to note 3 and 9 in the relevant square when one of the voices in my head said “What the fuck? If you’re not going to learn from your mistakes, surely that makes them even worse?”

Reader, I put the answer in. Yes, the answer I only knew because I’d made a mistake and been called on it. I made progress by using the knowledge I gained from cocking something up. The world did not end. The Devil did not burst into the room to welcome me as a prospective denizen of Hell. There were no gasps of horror from any gods/spirits/ancestors who might or might not be watching over me. I was not struck down. (In fairness, I should mention that nor was there a celebratory chorus from a heavenly host, or overt showering of divine blessings on my shoulders (unless you count solving the puzzle)).

Will this lead to an enthusiastic embracing of my mistakes, past, present and future? Much as I’d like to respond with a hearty “Hell yeah” (a phrase I normally despise), previous experience of how sudden insights have impacted my behaviour and thinking, suggests that “almost certainly not, but there will be improvement” is a more realistic assessment.

If personal growth was all about sudden insights permanently transforming you, then presumably we’d all be attaining perfection pretty damn sharpish. As this clearly isn’t happening, I’m guessing personal growth is more of an ongoing process of learning. Possibly from mistakes…