The pre-dawn streets were quiet places where the quiet can enter and warm your heart. For me, that quiet opens a space for slow down time while I am hurrying along the streets; it provides chances for focus and clarity that the hussle and bustle of the normal day does not. It’s a precious wedge of time, when I am alone, that lets me go to that serene place within me where I felt that wonderful, renewing, and energizing connectedness with myself. In that pre-dawn darkness, a thought dawned on me that was prompted by a lot of what I read in this month’s, “The Failure Issue” of the Harvard Business Review. Do we really teach students how to achieve? That is, after all is said and done, one of their birthrights. Yeah, we inundate them with a flood of information. Yeah, we say we develop their critical thinking skills. Yeah, we say we train them in problem solving. But, do we teach them that mistake is a gift? Do we teach them more about “bad mistakes” than we do “good mistakes?” Do we teach them that the ability to learn from mistakes is one of the most important capacities they can learn? Do we really teach them how to exercise their birthright to achieve? I wonder. I wonder because in the process of all this transmission and development and training, we strip students and ourselves of the very essence of achievement that is our second human birthright: the birthright to make mistakes and learn from them in order to achieve.
Fifteen years ago, I started learning that the only real mistake is in being afraid to make a mistake, not making one. We educators should not put a condom over our classroom in our quest to practice only “safe teaching.” We shouldn’t post “Mistake-free Zone. Violators will be prosecuted” signs around our institutions. But, we do. Why is that? Why is it that we in academia don’t cotton mistakes of ourselves or others? Why do we think of mistakes as cosmic warps. Why are we so often horrified and inflamed by mistake. Why do we accused and condemn, and even burn in effigy those who misstep? Why do we see mistakes in ourselves and others as signs of being “weak” and/or “no good at?” Why do we welcome an “aha” and shun an “oops?” Is it that we’re really hypocrites, seeing mistake as a badge of honor of honor while on the hand treating it as a scarlet letter? Do we platitudinously celebrate mistake as a learning tool while in reality treating it as an anathema? Do we treat mistake as a taboo because we’re afraid of vulnerability, hidden imperfections, weakness, a sense of inadequacy? Are we in fear for our reputation, authority, our precious selves, our image, our ego, our carefully constructed identities? Are we afraid to be shaken from our complacency, our pride, our arrogance? Why does the prospect of making a mistake strike terror in our hearts? Why do we cling so tightly to our lesser half? Why do we deny that mistake is the cost of achievement, that is, if we don’t have the confidence and courage to make a mistake, we won’t strive to achieve. If truth be told, mistakes may be unfashionable, but they are necessary and inevitable. That inner strength we call confidence is the “cheapest” form of self-motivation, but it is the most crucial, the hardest to create in ourselves much less in others. Yet, do we have a “cognitive bias” or an “attribution error” that urges us to only reflect on our “successes” and thus prevents us from understanding that simple but challenging truth? Do we really –I mean, really–understand that? Do we really know how to accept mistake; do we really know how to learn from mistake; do we really know how to rebound from mistake; do we really know the difference between “bad mistake” that we let hold us back and “good mistake” that we use, in the phrase of Charles Kettering, to “fail forward.” If we don’t, if we make a doozie of a mistake about making mistakes we’re in big trouble, and we may mistakenly not even know it!
Louis