Errors & Mistakes

What we aren’t learning from them…

We are humans. Surprise. Hopefully you knew that already, but that being said, since we have human like characteristics we tend to make errors in judgment and mistakes. We are infallible, and if that came as a surprise to you, sorry.

I’ve just finished reading a really interesting book, “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me).” The authors go into great detail about self justification, and cognitive dissonance. Essentially, if we weren’t so good at justifying our actions, and allowing cognitive dissonance to help us remember what makes us feel good then we would probably all be suicidal all the time. So on the one hand it’s a good thing. On the other, however, we tend to have this incredible ability to shift blame to anyone but us, and never learn from the mistakes we make.

An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it. — Orlando A. Battista

When we make an error, we should own up to it and really learn from it. It’s not like you are a perfectly designed machine that never screws up, quite the opposite, but we tend to let ourselves feel bad that we made such an error and allow others to do the same to us. We shouldn’t try and make mistakes, but when they do happen, we should realize that we can correct them, learn from them, and move forward with the historical knowledge that the next time around you won’t do that again.

There are plenty of errors I’ve made in my life that I’ve allowed to become mistakes, but until you make a few of those it’s hard to know what to do in the next unknown territory.