On the importance of making mistakes
Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 6:29AM 
We all make mistakes, constantly.
We just can’t help it.
I dare say you have made a couple at least in the time it has taken you to read this sentence.
Admittedly, they may not have been big ones. I don’t suppose many of you got around to robbing a bank or kicking the neighbour’s cat.
But you may have mis-read a word or simply arrived on this page in error!
And during the course of today you may also have hit the curb whilst driving round that tight corner, made a questionable decision back in the office, reproached one of your children unfairly or got lost while walking in the woods.
The fact is, mistakes are a bit like twins. Once you start noticing them, you realize that they are everywhere!
But let’s not get too bogged down here. Life is obviously more than the sum of our mistakes.
Or is it?
Some would say mistakes are actually critical to human success. Without them, they argue, we are literally doomed.
St Augustine first coined the phrase: felix culpa, literally translated as ‘lucky fall’.
“O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer.”
It was Hegel, though, during the Enlightenment that took this argument to its ultimate conclusion. The whole of human history, he argues, is a continuous positive movement in which mistakes are vital for human progress. In other words, we wouldn’t have it so good today if Eve hadn’t taken a bite of that apple in the Garden of Eden. Even the most famous ‘mistake’ in all of human history is therefore a ‘fall upwards’.
Hegel was a notorious optimist and clearly this kind of argument is dangerous in the hands of those who, for example, want to somehow ‘make good’ the suffering that occurs in the holocaust or an act of genocide.
But maybe, in another context, he does have a point. Maybe there is a pattern to our lives in which we move forward only by making mistakes and getting it wrong occasionally.
After all, practice (i.e. making lots of mistakes) makes perfect.
Or as someone else once said: ‘The man who is unlikely to make mistakes is unlikely to make anything.’
So here’s what I am left wondering:
As a teacher and a parent, do I create an environment in which mistakes are understood as an acceptable, necessary, ‘good’ part of learning or have my children become frightened of being wrong?
I watched Ken Robinson speak recently on the importance of the creative arts in schools. He reminded me that the great thing about kids is that they will always take a chance: ‘If they don’t know, they’ll have a go.’ Anyone who’s been around young children will know this, for sure: they are innocently and eternally optimistic.
Some education systems (and some homes, for that matter), however, are built on the understanding that mistakes must always be punished. So kids learn, via this unwritten curriculum, not to ‘have a go’ anymore. And in learning that, they never learn anything else.
A final thought.
Imagine a world in which mistakes no longer existed.
In his book, A history of the world in 10 ½ chapters, Julian Barnes does just that. He speaks of a man who dreams of being in heaven.
Now heaven, for this man, is actually set on a golf course (you see, he had been an avid golfer throughout his life). And, as you might expect, it is the most wonderful, challenging golf course that ever existed.
At first, the course gives this man an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder. But it doesn’t last. Little by little, he starts to improve his game until, one day, he makes it around the entire course in 18 shots – a hole-in-1 every time! And then, after a little while longer, he manages to do get around every time in 18.
It is precisely at this point, or so the story goes, that the man no longer feels like heaven is anything like it was cracked up to be. Sure, he no longer makes any mistakes, but he now finds himself bored and unchallenged in this new celestial world.
So he walks up to one of the angels and asks whether he might not have a bit of difficulty, pain, even suffering, added into his life. He preferred it that way.
And the moral of the story?
Real life is better than perfect life: any day.
Reader Comments (3)
I liked this, it has reminded me that it is the hard stuff in our lives that makes us appreiate the good stuff. Therefore life is good.
Making Mistakes it is the most important thing on life, it maintains the balance level between arrogance and humility, it keeps people´s spirits open towards the education process and creates a unique space for choosing another path and risk other way of doing things.
A very interesting approach! Thank you
Thank you both for your comments. Yes, I too believe that life is essentially good and that, somehow, even the 'hard bits' are redeemable in the grand scheme of things - although I think we always have to settle for a few rough edges here and there that can never be ironed out. If I look back on my life, I would also certainly say that some of the best opportunities and moments in my life came about because of taking the "wrong" path - rather like getting lost and travelling down a path that leads you to an amazing view.