When You Make a Mistake

If you ever start feeling superhuman, wait a day or two — you're sure to make a mistake, and you'll probably feel bad about it. Making mistakes is nothing to worry about — it's proof of your humanity. The time to worry is when you don't think you're making mistakes, because you probably are — you just don't know it yet.

Finding out that we've made a mistake can be a really good thing. In October, 2001, when I edited the configuration file for my newsletter, I unwittingly turned on an option that enables everyone to send anything at all to the list. Nothing much happened until February, when a subscriber replied to an issue, another complained that that message was spam, someone else advised people not to reply to the list, and so on, until the world exploded. If I had found out about my mistake earlier, in some other way, only I would have known.

If recognizing a mistake can actually be a good thing, why do we have such a hard time acknowledging mistakes? For many of us, the difficulty traces to what Virginia Satir called a survival rule. Survival rules are over-generalized imperatives that we usually learn when very young, like "I must eat everything on my plate." Of course, there are no exemptions for survival rules, even for reasonable circumstances, and that's where the trouble begins.

Finding out that
we've made a mistake
can be a really good thingSince it's our nature to make mistakes, a rule forbidding them — "I must never make a mistake" — provides an unending supply of trouble. When we do make a mistake, we feel bad about the consequences, but we also feel bad about the mistake itself. We can feel so bad that we deny it, or lie, or commit crimes, or even write long emails.

Converting rules to more forgiving guidelines is very helpful. A more reasonable guideline might be something like "I do my best not to make mistakes, and I'm human."

And it helps to reframe mistakes. In many ways, mistakes can actually be gifts in disguise. Here are a few gifts that sometimes come along with mistakes:

• If you realize that you've made a mistake, it wasn't fatal.
• Every mistake is an opportunity to practice owning up to mistakes.
• The earlier you find out about a mistake, the more time you have to do something about it.
• Your mistakes are a service to your community — everyone around you feels better about their own fallibility.
• What you were actually trying to do might have been even worse than the mistake you made.

Sometimes the shortest path to new insight is through a mistake.  Top    Next Issue

The article you've been reading is an archived issue of Point Lookout, my weekly newsletter. I've been publishing it since January, 2001, free to all subscribers, over the Web, and via RSS. You can help keep it free by donating either as an individual or as an organization. You'll receive in return my sincere thanks — and the comfort of knowing that you've helped to propagate insights and perspectives that can help make our workplaces a little more human-friendly. More

For more on survival rules, see "Heavy Burdens: Should, Always, Must, and Never," Point Lookout for February 27, 2002.

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Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout

Coming April 24: Antipatterns for Time-Constrained Communication: 1

Knowing how to recognize just a few patterns that can lead to miscommunication can be helpful in reducing the incidence of problems. Here is Part 1 of a collection of communication antipatterns that arise in technical communication under time pressure. Available here and by RSS on April 24.

And on May 1: Antipatterns for Time-Constrained Communication: 2

Recognizing just a few patterns that can lead to miscommunication can reduce the incidence of problems. Here is Part 2 of a collection of antipatterns that arise in technical communication under time pressure, emphasizing those that depend on content. Available here and by RSS on May 1.

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