How to change the way you look at mistakes

When I was young, I dreaded the words ‘you’ve made a mistake’. In my head, it was the end of the world. Oh no! I thought. I am so stupid; I should have got it right. My friend got it right and so did my classmate, neighbour, her pet cat and friendly alien visitor. Everyone got it right except me! The horror!

Another fear was of falling. I’d happily climb a five feet high wall but then bawl for my dad to get me down. I was about five, or perhaps six, then. (Psst… sometimes I’d refuse to jump into his open arms and he’d have to go fetch a stool to get me to come down. :P)

But then when you grow up, as is inevitable, people, books, movies, shows and songs start telling you how mistakes and falls are the best things to happen to us. They say that mistakes make things fun, exciting and interesting plus we learn so much. (Here, it is tempting to go off on a tangent about how we curiously end up unlearning everything we’ve learnt as kids aka #Adulting, but please note my restraint as I resist!)

Anyway, this new bit of advice on welcoming mistakes sure sounds appealing but I just couldn’t convince my brain. After all a mistake is a mistake, right? That nagging voice in the head was just not convinced that goofing up was all that great. After it had been told all its life by various ‘adults’ in various ways that mistakes were only slightly preferred over hara-kiri.

But then I read Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by philosopher and cognitive scientist, Daniel C. Dennett. Mr. Dennett gives a simple example in the book that changed the way I looked at mistakes. He said that when we learn long division, we have no idea about the exact number that would divide a multi-digit number, right? So what do we do? We make a guess and input a number. Usually that number is either too small or too big. However, the choice of this number gives us an idea about the next number to input.

The first number we input is nearly always a mistake but we don’t look at working on long division as making mistakes. We look at it as guesswork that allows us to course correct our way to the answer. And voila! There I had it. My new way of looking at making mistakes or guesstimates (I later found… that’s an actual term!). The world makes no pretensions at being perfect or absolute, so the only thing left to us is to guesstimate and course correct our way to finding answers to life, the universe and everything. And if we can do it as madly as Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, then we can’t really have it any better.

If one prefers philosophy of a more solemn mien one can’t do better than, ‘human betterment is a gradual, two-steps-forward, one-step-back effort. Forgive yourself over and over and over again. Then try to do better next time.’ These are some of the kindest words I have read and it’s from the book, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness, a compilation of the teachings of Greek philosopher Epictetus by Sharon Lebell.

If you have a found a more delightful or a kinder way of looking at mistakes, please do share. J

Happy guesstimating!

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