Mistakes and behavior change.
You’re making mistakes. Everybody does. You’ll make mistakes tomorrow, too. It’s okay.
But look at the mistakes you made yesterday, last week. Are they suspiciously familiar? Maybe because you made them again today? Maybe because you’ve made them a thousand times over?
Mistakes are forgivable. (They’d better be, or I’m in big trouble.) But repeated mistakes should teach you a lesson, not in the cliched sense of “that will teach you a lesson,” but in the real sense that you learn to change your behavior to avoid the mistake in the future.
Behavior change, by the way, is notoriously hard.
But it’s the only way to get better.
Are you (or your company) changing your behaviors so the same old mistakes don’t recur?
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Photo by Nesster.
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Making new mistakes is hard. And it requires risk tolerance. Make comfortable mistakes is easier because we know how to recover from them.
Yet another reason why we need to strive to live outside our comfort zone as much as possible. Thanks for the reminder!
Tim,
Your timing is impeccable. This study from MIT (http://is.gd/2KeQg) raises questions about the difficulty of learning from mistakes, rather than learning from successes.
Granted, we’re different from monkeys (at least some of us are, some of the time), but the research does make you think a bit about some of our evolutionary predilections.
Thanks for the comments, fellas.
Dan, I’m giving that link a look now.