#1427 - It sucks
Making mistakes sucks.
I know errors are learning opportunities and that we should encourage people to dare to fail so they can grow. I'm also aware that every organization should create a blameless culture in which people can experiment and fail by having processes that transform missteps into opportunities.
We all know that, and there are plenty of articles and books on the absolute value of making mistakes.
However, in a conversation with a dear friend, two caveats emerged.
The first is that making mistakes sucks.
Yes, it sucks. And if we don't acknowledge that and deal with the emotional burden that comes with it, it's hard to move forward despite the best intentions.
Making mistakes is painful. And that's good because it's how our brain learns. Pleasure and disappointment are part of the feedback mechanism through which our brain distinguishes beneficial actions from useless ones. So, it can repeat the firsts and avoid the latter. Acknowledging the pain is the first step to avoiding transforming it into suffering and getting stuck in it.
The first caveat, then, is recognizing that making mistakes sucks.
The second one is that we don't automatically learn from failures. I know many people who have been making mistakes for a while now and have yet to make real progress in their lives.
Being open to errors is not enough. We must do some work to transform those errors into actual learning. Otherwise, we will just try to avoid it because we don't want to experience the same pain again. We need to take the time to reframe the error and move our attention from identifying what went wrong to recognizing what we can do differently.
But we can't get there without first acknowledging that making mistakes sucks.