Noah Katz

Making Mistakes is Good

People don’t like to make mistakes. Who would? No one wants to make or admit that they did something wrong.

This is actually backwards. You are going to make mistakes. Actually, making mistakes is a good thing. That is how you learn.

When you were in school, if you took a course and you got every answer right, without much trying, it was the wrong course. You pretty much knew everything (or close to it) about that material. If you wanted to learn something you should have taken a course that you did not know everything. You should have taken a tougher course. Yes, you would have made mistakes on the exams but you would have learned more.

Elon Musk is the richest person on planet earth. He got there by making mistakes, a lot of them, and big ones. When Elon Musk built up Space X, he and his team blew up more rockets than any other company in the history of rocket building. When a rocket blew up they looked at it as a learning process. What can we learn from this so that it does not happen again? Then fix it so that it doesn’t.

If you are getting a lot of answers wrong on your school exams, that’s a good thing. It means you may not be studying well and you need to change the way you are studying.

If your business is not taking off the way you want it to, that’s a good thing. It means what you are doing is not working and you need to change it to attract more customers.

If your relationships are not working then you need to go back and understand why and fix it so that it does not happen again.

When mistakes happen and you get things wrong it is definitely a good thing.

Many people thing that there are winners and losers in the world. It couldn’t be further from the truth. There are no winners and losers….THERE ARE WINNERS AND LEARNERS. Those that LEARN from their mistakes are the ones that improve.

Lastly, Dan Sullivan at the Strategic Coach Program has this down pat. He has a concept call the “Experience Transformer.” He teaches his clients (and I am one of them) that when things go wrong with you, it’s a good thing. Write down everything that worked, everything that didn’t, THEN, document a new process to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Then move from the learning to winning !