Mistakes: What We Can Learn from Them

I generally regard mistakes as something I want to avoid. But a new book, Alina Tugend’s Better by Mistake: the Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong, persuasively argues that making mistakes can have big psychological payoffs.

In her book, Tugend (she's also a columnist in The New York Times), takes an in-depth look at mistakes -- why we make them, and why we should try to learn from them rather than feel ashamed of them. One of the more interesting parts of Better by Mistake looks at the research of Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford who studies how children react to mistakes, errors and imperfection. Dweck’s work was partially inspired by her sixth grade teacher, who seated kids in descending order, according to their IQ; kids who scored higher on IQ tests got greater privileges.

In her research, Dweck has found that when children are praised for their intelligence rather than for their effort, they are more fearful of making mistakes and less willing to take chances. But when they are praised for effort, or when they think being smart is a skill that they can work at, they try harder and aren’t as discouraged by their mistakes. In other words, it’s better to tell a child, “You worked really hard on that,” than it is to say, “You’re really smart.”

Jugglers are among the most inspirational people in their treatment of errors. If you watch jugglers performing, you will almost always see them goof up: They’ll drop a ball, a club or even a flaming stick. What’s great is how they incorporate the mistake into their performance and keep going. They’ll retrieve an errant ball and then start again; it’s no big deal, and it just seems like part of the act.

Many of us, on the other hand, come to a dead stop when we make mistakes. We berate ourselves, we get discouraged, or we’re filled with regret. We struggle with hindsight bias, in which we look back at a decision that we have made as if we had at the time all the relevant information that we learned only after we made our choice. An example Tugend uses is her father’s family’s decision to leave Germany in 1939. Looking back, knowing the result, it’s easy to say that they should have left the country sooner. But it wasn’t so obvious at the time.

This book got me to think a little more about mistakes, to try to take them less seriously, and to remember that there is not always one right answer out there that is the clearly best choice.