Mistakes are not real

We’ve programmed ourselves to believe that making mistakes means that we aren’t good at something, or we aren’t making progress.

We live in a perfectionistic culture, where being perfect equates to success. This creates unrealistic expectations and fosters fear of failure.

Traditional education focuses on memorisation and standardised testing as a way of learning. The focus on getting the correct answer always extinguishes; creativity, experimenting, making mistakes and learning from failure.

Example: you get excited about learning a new skill, like playing guitar. You get lessons and start the learning process.

Over a few weeks you realise that you struggle with strumming and can’t follow the rhythm, you’re learning your favourite song but keep messing up parts in the song and don’t know how to play it properly.

You get overwhelmed because there’s so many songs you want to learn but you’re stuck on 1 song because there are tricky parts that you keep messing up.

After repeat tries you just think it’s too hard, you’re not made for this skill, you keep making mistakes and tell yourself that mistakes are bad therefore there’s an endless negative feedback loop circling your mind.

Apply this same concept and behaviour to other skills you want to learn, like language, programming and writing and over time you’ll program yourself to shy away from learning skills.

You’d rather be comfortable in not experiencing that pain again.

Why make mistakes?

Mistakes are part of progress, it means you’re learning.

Mistakes are only negative if you keep repeating the same ones. That is just a sign of not paying attention or putting in any effort to what you’re trying to do.

Our brain has the ability to adapt and re-program itself when faced with mistakes. When we make a mistake our neural pathways are activated we start to form new connections in the mind, our consciousness expands and we grow as a process.

In short, making mistakes helps keep our brain healthy.

It improves our memory because we’ll always remember that time when we f*cked up.

And it helps us foster creativity because we’re presented with opportunities to solve a challenge.

Mistakes are the key to fast learning. As they point out holes in your bias.

What next?

Instead of giving up on learning that song on the guitar, work out what you’re doing wrong. Adopt a troubleshooting mindset, solve the problem and you’ll level up.
 
Take what you know, go ahead and work with it, make a mistake and then course correct. Repeat this process and you’re on your way to deep knowledge and understanding.

Write about it!

Get frustrated, annoyed and angry then let all that energy out in journaling. 

If you’re afraid of making a mistake, write it out and tell yourself that it’s part of the process.

So go out there and keep making mistakes, learn and grow.

Mistakes are real, but the fear of mistakes isn’t.

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