Learning from Our Mistakes

The path to improvement is paved with mistakes. On our quest to improving our creative abilities, we will likely commit many mistakes but they shouldn’t stop us from pushing on. Instead, we should learn from them, find ways to never commit the same mistakes again, and grow as creative individuals.

How Do We Improve from Our Mistakes?

In order to answer this question, I will refer to Lauren Rivera’s blog post, “Accepting Your Mistakes: The First Step to Improvement!” Like myself, Rivera is a student in the School of Management at the University at Buffalo and is currently writing about her process to developing her public speaking skills on her blog.

According to Rivera, in order to learn from our mistakes, we need to install the growth mindset. She describes this mindset as “the idea that you are always improving and that there is always something you can work on”(2017). In other words, at any moment in time, there is always something available that we can work on and improve. Most things aren’t free from mistakes or flaws, which is one the primary reasons our road to improvement is never-ending. The mindset allows us to gradually improve ourselves and reach for excellence.

The growth mindset is essential for the improvement of our creativities. Take into consideration the idea of trials and tribulation experiments. These are basically experiments in which we conduct trials to see what methods work best for us in the development of our creativities. Once a trial has been conducted, we look at the results of it and attempt to find the mistakes. As we spot the mistakes, we attempt to fix them using the growth mindset and then conduct a new trial with the correction. Once that trial is completed, we basically repeat the process of finding the mistake, fixing it, and conducting more trials. As this experiment is continually repeated, the growth mindset is used. As each trial goes by, we grow in terms of strength and gradually strive towards excellence as we are fixing our mistakes trial by trial. It is a mindset that helps us to progressively perfect our creative techniques.

How Do I Plan to Use the Growth Mindset?

I plan on using the growth mindset by conducting various trials and tribulation experiments on my techniques to develop the creative characteristics mentioned within my last blog, “The Four Principle Characteristics of Creative Individuals.” I’ve been trying to find out what techniques work best to enhance my originality and flexibility characteristics as those are the characteristics that I am lacking. Although the success has been minimal due to my limited exposure to the characteristics, I believe that the growth mindset will inevitably allow me to see a successful future in which I have developed those two traits.

Reference:

Rivera, L. (2017, March 1). Accepting Your Mistakes: The First Step to Improvement! [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://medium.com/improving-public-speaking-skills-in-the-workplace/accepting-your-mistakes-the-first-step-to-improvement-86e9ac0fe1d1