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Many of us fear mistakes more than we should. This is often because of several faulty (unconscious) assumptions:

Mistakes cause us to go backward.

Most mistakes are very costly.

In reality, many mistakes move us forward more than backward.

Conscientious people often experience a springboard effect following mistakes, whereby fixing the mistakes in their diligent style accelerates growth faster than if they'd never made any missteps.

For conscientious people, mistakes create momentum.

When We Perceive Mistakes as Setting Us Back, We're Often Wrong, but We Need Data to Prove It

If you're like me, you take more heed of advice you're able to prove to yourself in concrete ways. This article is about how you do that.

Build Your Own Evidence of the Momentum Mistakes Create

Keep a running log of mistakes that create more progression than regression. Capture the exact mechanism through which the mistake accelerates your improvement. That gives you your own evidence for the concept.

Knowing the specific ways mistakes can create forward progress can help you spot when that's happening. Knowing the mechanisms can also help you take full advantage of the opportunity that fixing a mistake provides.

Mechanisms that Create Forward Progress from Mistakes

There are a ton of ways this happens. Here are some.

1. You Find a Limit by Pushing Yourself Beyond It

Example: You overdo an exercise at the gym and get a minor "tweak" injury that goes away after a few days. Or you do too much and flatten yourself more than you can recover from before your next scheduled session.

Exceeding a limit allows you to know what that limit truly is, and then you can more accurately go to that limit without busting it. A small short-term cost often allows a much better long-term calibration, if you're paying close attention.

2. You Mess Up Doing Something Manually, and That Prompts You to Automate It

Example: You pride yourself on not forgetting to pay a bill. Just through careful attention and memory, you've been on time making the payment for years. Until one month, you're not.

You figure out a way to automate it and realize you should've done that years ago. The mental load might've been a source of pride but was unnecessary.

3. A Mishap Shocks You into Better Safety Systems

Perhaps a small mishap with either yourself or your children shocks you into creating better safety systems. For example, you need to use a piece of emergency equipment. That leads you to make sure you know how to find and use all the equipment you have, and that nothing's expired, missing, or in need of maintenance.

What Is Conscientiousness?

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4. A Task that Goes Very Pear-Shaped Leads to a Better Correction than One that Only Goes a Little Wrong

Let's say a task goes way over budget in time or money or blows out in some other way. That same task might have gone mildly pear-shaped many times before, but that wasn't enough for you to invest the effort in fixing your process.

The big blowout prompts you to fix the underlying process. For example, your hiring or training is less than ideal. When a new hire messes up a system in an expensive way, it leads you to fix what was always leaky.

5. You Discover a Valuable Resource in the Process of Fixing a Mistake

Imagine that you break a large sliding door and need to call around to tradespeople to get quotes. If you haven't had to find a good tradesperson in a while, you might not have a well-dialed system for finding someone without a direct recommendation from a family member or friend.

You might need that tradesperson again, or you might just need the system you used to find them.

6. Fixing a Mistake Builds Skills or Confidence

We go through phases in life when we do especially hard things, like the first few months in a new job, exams, moving away from supports, or parenting a newborn for the first time.

If you haven't done something extremely hard recently, you can lose your mojo for it. It can feel like another version of you did all those hard things and you're now disconnected from that "you."

Fixing a mistake can sometimes restore your confidence that you can still navigate major challenges and help you feel less stuck in the status quo.

7. Finding the Right Item after Buying the Wrong One Results in Deeper Familiarity with Tools

You try to fix something yourself, and the item you buy to do it isn't correct. But several trips to the hardware store give you much more familiarity with different tools than you had before.

Going up and down the aisles looking for what might be the right tool helps you understand what you need for other projects.

Mistakes Often Result in Net Forward Progress

With many mistakes, the benefits we reap in the process of conscientiously fixing them outweigh the costs of the mistake itself.

Sometimes we're unlucky, and we make a mistake that has large consequences with little warning. With most mistakes, if we correct them diligently, the resilience built from that experience usurps the harm of the mistake.

For these reasons, you shouldn't view mistakes purely as setbacks,. Yet many careful people do just that.

It's hard to hear, but pride in never making mistakes is misplaced.

The phrase "Don't fear mistakes" sounds very flippant until you prove to yourself that mistakes often result in momentum that you wouldn't have stumbled into otherwise.

Conscientious people can benefit from logging the exact mechanism through which an error caused more forward progress than it set them back.

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