
The One, Simple Change that Improved Benjamin’s Performance by 15% (and anyone can do it)
My eight-year-old son, Benjamin, loves obstacle courses. Earlier this year, while testing one of his most difficult courses, he got his completion time down to 19.02 seconds after many attempts and much effort. Then we made a change that made all the difference. Within just a few runs, he had cut his time down to 15.75 seconds.
Here’s what we changed, and yes, there is a life lesson here:
At first, I disqualified him any time he made a mistake and he had to start over. This caused him to be cautious and ensure he wouldn’t make a mistake because he didn’t want to start over and be disqualified. By this rule, I was sending the message, “Mistakes aren’t okay.”
But when I saw how he was responding, I changed the rule and told him to keep going when he made a mistake and we’d still log the time. I encouraged him to take risks and try different movements at different slow spots on the course. Because he no longer felt like he was going to be penalized for making mistakes, he felt free to experiment.
Immediately, his time improved by about a second, albeit with a couple mistakes. But as he continued to innovate and change what he was doing on the course, not only did his time continue to improve, but he began to master new movements and techniques, and the mistakes he made were temporary.
By about the tenth run after the adjustment, he did a 15.75-second run without any mistakes.
This might seem obvious, and yet there’s a key lesson here that we often don’t apply in our own lives. Where aren’t you allowing yourself to make mistakes and experiment? In your work? Your relationships? Your home management? In your leisure and fun? To each you answered yes, you have greatly limited it.
If the costs of mistakes is too great in any part of your life for you to take risks, then you’re in trouble in that area.
So the life lesson? Experiment and let things get messy and “mistakeful”. It’s a simple change that can make a huge difference in your performance.
