When we were children, one of the worst things that could happen to us was to see the big red X marks on our tests that let us know just how many mistakes we had made. This was reinforced as we aged, as we were yelled at or otherwise punished when we erred.
As such, most adults balk at the idea of actively engaging in pursuits that have a high chance of failure, choosing easier and “safer” wins instead. But that’s often not the best option, especially if you don’t want to stagnate in life. Here’s how to embrace mistakes instead of shying away from them, so you can grow much faster as a human being.
1. Embrace mistakes with gentle humor rather than self-loathing
When a toddler falls on their backside while learning to walk, their parents don’t reproach them for daring to fall. Instead, they may exclaim “whoopsie!” like it was a fun experience, and then encourage the little one to get back up again. It’s only as we get older that missteps get treated like grave transgressions instead of personal development exercises.
During the learning process of any endeavor, we’ll all do the equivalent of falling on our butts now and then. Sometimes literally, depending on the skill being learned! The key is to take those missteps in stride with a grin, rather than being full of self-loathing. When and if you fall on your butt (literally or figuratively), see the humor in it with an attitude of “well, that didn’t work!”, and then make an adjustment when you try again.
2. Actively seek out interests that involve a lot of trial and error.
My partner and I both have backgrounds in crafts that require a great amount of trial and error. Pottery-making, blacksmithing, glass-blowing, and fiber arts are all deeply humbling because *one small* deviation in their production can completely change the outcome. As a result, we often have to repeat experiments several times over, using materials and techniques in a variety of ways to discover what works, and what doesn’t, and why.
Essentially, it’s only by trying different approaches over and over again that you can hone your skills and have more successes than errors in the future. Pursuing any of these crafts — or similar ones that pique your interest, like baking or woodworking — is highly recommended to program yourself to embrace mistakes as ideal learning opportunities, rather than berating yourself for not doing something perfectly the first or second time. (They’re also great at teaching you to accept the fact that you can do everything “right”, and still fail due to circumstances beyond your control.)
3. Let go of the fear of pain or suffering associated with mistakes.
The anticipation of pain is almost always worse than the pain itself. Think about how many times you’ve expected a scenario to work out truly horribly, whether it was a dental visit or a call into your boss’s office, only to discover that things weren’t anywhere near as bad as what you thought they’d be. In fact, you might have riled yourself into a frothy mess of worry for absolutely nothing.
It’s part of human nature to get attached to the idea of a desired outcome. This is true whether it’s daydreaming about how someone we’re dating may be our forever person, or succeeding at a project that may endow us with rather generous wealth or accolades. And since we get so attached to these daydreams, it can be devastating when situations don’t unfold as we imagined.
Ultimately, however, the reality of the pain of loss or failure is rarely as bad as what we assumed we’d feel if these dreams didn’t pan out. Stay present, only deal with mistakes if they happen instead of anticipating grief or pain, and flow with what unfolds with as much grace as possible.
4. Remember that you are separate from the outcome of your actions.
A failed endeavor doesn’t make you a failure as a person. It simply makes you a human being who has to learn through trial and error, just like everyone else. There has never been a single individual in 300 thousand years of Homo sapiens wandering the Earth who has been perfect at every single thing they’ve ever done the first time they’ve tried it.
There are countless reasons why you might make a mistake or fail at an endeavor, from utter exhaustion or brain fog to faulty ingredients or equipment that you’re working with. Your errors don’t make you a bad person, or a failure, or useless, or any other insults you may fling at your reflection in the mirror.
When you divorce your mistakes from your essential nature, you’ll be much more tolerant and forgiving of your errors, which leaves a lot more room to get up again and keep trying until you get it right.
5. Pursue something you’re certain to be rejected for.
Those who are most comfortable with embracing mistakes are those who have good coping mechanisms for the discomfort that rejection and failure can bring. If you’d like to create greater resilience in this realm, expose yourself to situations where they’re inevitable.
Assuming you’re single, I highly recommend doing something like approaching someone for a date that you’re 99% sure you have zero chance with. I’ve had enough experience with this that I know just how effective it is for building up your ability to handle rejection well. After a few failed tries, the sting simply goes out of it, and you learn to take a “no” in stride rather than viewing it as a poor reflection of you and your character.
6. Teach someone else what you’ve learned.
An 18th-century moralist named Joseph Joubert once said: “Enseigner, c’est apprendre deux fois.” This translates roughly as: “To teach is to learn something twice over”. Turning a mistake into a learning experience helps you to grow exponentially, but teaching someone else what you’ve learned from your own failures can help you grow even more.
This is because you haven’t just gone back over the new, successful method you’ve learned for doing it the right way — you’ve also deconstructed it to ensure that it’ll work when someone else tries it as well. When you do this, you approach it from more angles than you might have done when dealing with it alone, since you need to break it down to its essentials to teach someone else what you know, step by step.
Few things allow you to understand the inner workings of a thing, like taking it apart and then reassembling it again.
7. Forgive the past version of yourself who didn’t know better.
Holding onto anger at yourself for past missteps will hold you back more than you realize. This is because your vision is firmly fixed on the past instead of the future you’re striving towards. We all look back at things we’ve done poorly — whether skill-wise or with regard to relationship dynamics — and feel anger, frustration, or shame because we didn’t do as well as we could have done.
Many people admonish one another to “do better,” but the only way that can happen is to embrace and learn from mistakes, and weave those experiences into the tapestry of immense personal growth. Only then can we understand why we behaved the way we did, and make a concerted effort not to repeat it in the future.
Final thoughts…
One of the best pieces of advice I was given was to see so-called “mistakes” as learning experiences. Even when I was lying on my back at the bottom of a gorge I’d fallen into, I analyzed where and why I’d misstepped, and how I could better negotiate my way along there next time if I got out of there in one piece.
It’s not an easy thing to do, to set your ego aside in favor of the humility needed to learn from errors, but it’s imperative for failing forward and embracing mistakes instead of hiding from them.
