Consistent is Correctable

Making the same mistake is actually awesome

I was skating a few months ago(skateboarding if you’re not hip to the slang), trying to land a board slide down a low railing. I kept leaning back too far and slipping off. I started to get frustrated, thinking to myself, “I keep making the same mistake!”.

That’s when it dawned on me: making the same mistake over and over again is awesome.

Not that we want to make mistakes— we’d rather things just worked. But, making mistakes is inevitable if you’re learning something new, and it’s no big deal. If you’re consistently making the same mistake, that’s the first step towards finding the leverage point to stop making the mistake.

It’s like when your car isn’t running very well, so you take it to the mechanic. The mechanic says it ran fine when they tested it, so you pay $100 for their time and you’re right back where you started. Inconsistent problems are a bitch to troubleshoot, because the symptoms disappear when you need them.

But if your car won’t start, well that’s a different thing. The mechanic keeps working until the car starts, and everyone can agree the problem is fixed. (At least until the next time your car won’t start; hopefully your mechanic is into root-cause analysis.)

Solving problems is equally about identifying the conditions the problem occurs in as it is deriving the solution. Every problem is consistent in some way, and consistent is correctable. If a problem seems erratic, it’s because we haven’t isolated the conditions yet.

When we become aware that we keep making the same mistake, we’re halfway to a fix. The entire first part of the problem — isolating the conditions — is done. Knowing is half the battle. So instead of getting frustrated, when we hear ourselves say, “I’m making the same mistake!”, that should be our, “Eureka!”, moment.

Now that I knew I was slipping off backwards every time, I got out a scrap of paper and worked out the mechanics of what was happening with stick figures. I updated my mental image of where my weight needed to be, and Bam!: landed it on the third try.

The pattern is turning up everywhere in my life now that I’m looking for it. Frustration seems intrinsically linked with repetition (we get frustrated because we keep failing), and repeatability is paired with finding solutions.

Co-workers leaving dishes in the sink every time? That one person who always hits Reply All? Someone who’s late for every meeting? That’s fertile ground for change: armed with your super-power of predicting the future, you’re that much closer to jamming the signal, disrupting the pattern, and living in world where you aren’t frustrated, you’re empowered.