The Value of Mistakes

In her presentation for TLU entitled, "A Life of Innovation," acclaimed poet Naomi Shihab Nye offered some thoughts on how to make space and time for innovation. She encouraged her audience to lower their expectations and to embrace a little weirdness now and then. She spoke about how innovation involves risk-taking and a need to stay strong when we face failure or rejection.  

Sports psychologist Alan Goldberg points out that "to master anything new, you must start out at the bottom, as a beginner. Beginners can only learn by making mistakes and figuring out through these mistakes what not to do the next time in order to get it right. If you give yourself too much of a hard time when you fail, then you'll be more reluctant to take the risks necessary to get you to your goals" ("Handling Failure"). 

Most of you are beginners at this college thing.  Heidi Halvorson's advice is simple: "Give yourself permission to screw-up" ("Why Letting Yourself Make Mistakes Means Making Fewer of Them").  She recommends replacing "be good" goals with "get better" ones.  For Halvorson, this means "the difference between wanting to show that you are smart vs. wanting to get smarter" ("Why Letting...").  Her argument explains that, ironically, allowing room for mistakes and considering ourselves works in progress can help us to achieve higher levels of success.    

You might think that the key to success is to completely eliminate mistakes and failures, but most people who have achieved anything will agree that errors are crucial to getting to the next level.  Here's a famous example of the importance of failure.  Ask any group of high-performing athletes or college graduates to pinpoint the mistakes they made that ultimately helped them to succeed and see what you come up with.  It's not the mistakes themselves, but what we do with them that will determine our ultimate outcome. As Mary Steinhardt pointed out, "what we do have control over is our response." ("Facing Failure with Resilience"). 

Write a post exploring your own feelings about mistakes and failure.  What role have mistakes played in your own achievements, in school and in other facets of your life?  What can you do to make peace with your imperfections?  What can you learn from them to help you in the future?  How might this help you to become a better learner, both short-term and long-term? 

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Works Cited

Goldberg, Alan. "Handling Failure." Competitive Advantage: Sports Psychology, Peak Performance, and Overcoming Fears and Blocks. Competitive Advantage, June 1999. Web. 10 Nov. 2012.

Halvorson, Heidi Grant. "Why Letting Yourself Make Mistakes Means Making Fewer of Them." Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers LLC, 1 Feb. 2011. Web. 10 Nov. 2012.

Michael Jordan - nike commercial (failure). YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2012.

Nye, Naomi Shihab. "A Life of Innovation." Texas Lutheran University, Krost Symposium. Jackson Auditorium, Seguin. 2 Oct. 2013. Reading.

Steinhardt, Mary. "Facing Failure with Resilience." Texas Lutheran University, Krost Symposium. Jackson Auditorium, Seguin. 3 Oct. 2013. Lecture.