The Second Essential Skill

Everything in life is a skill. But which of them might be the most important? The first is the art of loving — and we won’t even argue about that one. So what comes second? The ability to make mistakes and pull experience out of them.

Mistakes can be roughly split into two groups.

The first are the ones born of carelessness, oversight, a wandering mind, and so on. As a rule, those get corrected by building checklists, iterating on them, and actually following them — and they’re not what we’re here to talk about today.

The second group are the mistakes that follow from our own conscious decisions. Sometimes we see right away that something might go wrong, and on occasion we can even weigh the risks and the odds; other times we act in pure uncertainty, with the outcome unknown to us in advance.

So how do we structure the act of making mistakes — turn it into a tool for learning and understanding?

Making mistakes is an art that lets us:

— Find the courage to take a risk and own decisions that could lead to failure.

— Trace cause and effect and draw conclusions, so we don’t repeat the same mistakes later. As Albert Einstein put it: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

— Dodge the big failures through a string of small misses. I once read about the idea of a “tax on a happy life” — deliberately living through small misfortunes on a regular basis. First, by contrast, we feel the joy of the good moments more sharply. Second, a life with no failures at all is impossible, and it’s better to meet small troubles often than to run into the rare but critical collapse.

— Recover after a setback and keep moving. Not eat ourselves alive with guilt. “Falling isn’t the scary part — not getting back up is.”

— Stay emotionally unhooked from other people’s opinions and criticism, and stop fearing their judgment.

We learn through mistakes. As children we wouldn’t have learned to walk if we hadn’t fallen. But with age we grow more and more cautious. On top of that, we’re told from every direction that mistakes are bad, that the road to success runs through algorithms of “correct” moves — which someone will gladly teach us for our own money. Plenty of motivation systems are tuned to zero tolerance for error, and that often kills innovation and any creative streak. Yet adaptability is a key element of evolution!

Looking back at my own road, I’ve made an enormous number of mistakes, some of them fairly serious — though not fatal. After a few of them I literally couldn’t sleep, drowning in the harshest stress, blaming myself, replaying the situation over and over. In the end I realized that sometimes mistakes like these are necessary — so the experience gets burned into the back of the mind and “saved” to the subconscious for the rest of your life. Maybe if the loss hadn’t been so tangible, we wouldn’t have given it its due weight, and somewhere down the line we’d have hit a situation that was already critical. Everything happens for the best!

The more biographies of remarkable people I read, the more I’m amazed at the hardships they sometimes had to pass through to forge themselves and their character — and, in the end, reach heights unreachable without that road. You can judge a person by the scale of their enemies and the scale of their mistakes.

For something practical — what questions can we ask ourselves when facing a decision that might cost us?

A technique close to the Cartesian Square:

— What can I gain if I get the result?

— What do I lose if I do nothing? Am I robbing myself of my own dream through hesitation and inaction?

— What do I spare myself by not making this decision? What’s the potential worst-case outcome? How fast could I recover from it?

— What good might come if I make no decision at all?

— Will any of this matter in three to five years?

Mistakes are precious stones set in experience.

Here’s to the courage to make mistakes and learn from them! 😎