Mistakes are for idiots

If you're making mistakes, you're not good enough at your job, simple. Sounds about right, doesn’t it?

Many companies use the old GE performance review system of 1-5 (Microsoft did in the past), whereby five was not where you wanted to be. Often but not always, in that type of review model, managers look for mistakes made by employees to justify the five. Therefore, mistakes must not be good?

To survive in a culture like that, avoid mistakes, stick to the status quo, don’t try anything that puts you outside your comfort zone. Sounds like a fun place to work, doesn’t it? In my opinion that performance model stifles creativity, people are afraid to do something that could risk them becoming a five.

It's OK to make mistakes. If you are making the same mistakes over and over, then it might be best to see a shrink and check you are not insane (see Albert Einstein definition of insanity).

Mistakes are the birthplace of creativity, if you're not making mistakes you're not learning. 

In childhood, we were not afraid to make mistakes but somewhere along the way we lose that curiosity or maybe better put, we lose the ‘not giving a shit’ about what other people think!

Learning to ride a bike as a child you have training wheels, you'll probably still fall off, the training wheels will be removed at some point, 100% you'll fall. Likely more than once. As a child you know that, but still do it, why? Easy, because you want to ride a bike and falling is part of the process, mistakes are part of the process, you don't care what others think! You want to ride your bike!

We had fearlessness as a child and I think through our education systems, most of us lose it (me included). So how do you get it back? You need to start telling yourself mistakes are part of the process. Then treat the process as your way to learn. Ask yourself, why you made the mistake? What did you learn from it? Based on what you learned, how can you do it better next time? Once you start to see it as part of your "learning process", you'll become more comfortable with it. That is Growth Mindset in practice.

I like to ask the interview question, tell me about your last mistake? From the answer, it's easy to see if you have a future employee who is not afraid to take risks and raise the bar. Trust me, we all want them people! For managers it's your job to foster those people when you have them and create an environemt that allows mistakes.

I'll leave you with a quote I love from Theodore Roosevelt that Brene Brown uses a lot. Take your time to read it and then ask yourself the question, when was the last time you were in the arena and failed greatly? If you can't answer that, you're living in your comfort zone and care too much what others think. Be brave and push yourself, you might make a mistake along the way, but that’s ok, it's all part of your learning process.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat"

Note: Thank you for all the feedback on my fist blog, I was genuinely very surprised. I made a personal commitment to myself to try one a month starting from now. It only took me ten years to write my first one! My hope is someone out there finds something useful that might help them learn.