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Who do you trust more? Someone who never makes mistakes or someone who deals with their mistakes openly and directly? We know the first one doesn't exist. Som
by dgb23 5y ago
Who do you trust more?
Someone who never makes mistakes or someone who deals with their mistakes openly and directly?
We know the first one doesn't exist. Some people like to make us believe that, but it's bullshit.
However, one big caveat: Owning mistakes, being open about them doesn't absolve us from making them, especially not in the future. We still _made_ the mistake. Should we dwell on that or get punished? Likely not. Severity, intention and so on matter too. But should we simply not feel bad about it? "Embrace mistakes"? Not so sure about that either.
When we say "embrace mistakes", what we really mean is "embrace learning". Mistakes are opportunities to learn for ourselves and others indirectly.
We shouldn't be victims of our bad feelings and beat ourselves up. I did that for years. It crushed my confidence and well-being into submission and years after I'm still recovering from that. But the solution is not to try and make us feel good about ourselves regardless. It's not _just_ a psychological problem.
Mistakes happen for a reason, even if they are as simple as "I didn't write that down". They happen all the time, we can't prevent that, but what we can do is decide what kind of mistakes we want to face and ultimately what kind of problems we want to solve, be able to solve - for us and others.
Don't get bogged down, don't beat yourself up and don't let others beat you up for your mistakes. But make yourself aware that you can actually learn from them and decide for yourself when you want or need to put the energy into doing that.
- webmobdev 5y agoAnd sometimes even if you are an expert, you may still make a mistake if you aren't in an optimal frame of mind - for example, if you didn't sleep or eat properly or had an altercation with someone, or your normal routine got messed up ... sometimes it is just that - a shitty day in your life with nothing to learn but to just go through it.
- qsort 5y agoI like this point of view. I get why people are saying things like "normalize mistakes" etc, living in some kind of police state environment that punishes every misstep is just miserable. Especially if you're working in software, where "no mistakes" is not a reasonable standard. OTOH it shouldn't become an excuse for complacency, and especially not an excuse to tolerate incompetence and/or totally unforced errors.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI have a friend that used to drive trucks for mobsters, in New York. He tells me a story about how he drove his truck under a low bridge, and did about $20,000 worth of damage to it. When he got back, he was expecting to get fired (or worse). Instead, his boss asked him what he'd learned from the mistake, and gave him his next assignment. When my friend asked (incredulously) why he didn't get fired, his boss answered "I just spent twenty thousand bucks, training you to be careful of clearance. You think I'm gonna toss that out?" My friend says he learned a lot about management from these goombahs. They were managing very dangerous people, who were big investments, and couldn't be treated badly or disrespectfully.
- judahmeek 5y agoThis story is a myth I've heard before. I believe the original source is Thomas J. Watson, but it probably goes farther back then that: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/thomas_j_watson_209882 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/thomas_j_watson_209882
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoNo, this guy really experienced it. It's likely his boss had a cultural introduction to the technique. I actually know a number of folks [formerly] from that subculture (I hang out with some ... interesting ... people). I'm sure it didn't cost him too much. He used 20K as a nice, fat number, but they probably only needed to shell out a couple hundred bucks out of pocket. It was an easy act to do. Impressed my friend, but he didn't really think about the background. They are like that. Not exactly The Sopranos. Quite different from TV.
- RustyConsul 5y agoThis story is an exact mob version of the story Horowitz told in hard things about hard things
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoMaybe he read the book, or maybe this was a fairly common practice, amongst a certain demographic (it was in the early 1990s), and Horowitz heard about it.
- suketk 5y agoExactly. We tend to underestimate the power of compounding wrt learning from your mistakes. Two things that are important here: honesty (you can't fix what you don't know) and consistency (tight feedback loop = faster compounding). This extends far beyond software programming. It applies to any form of self-development. I actually developed a habit formation program framework [0] built off of these principles (and a couple others, e.g aligned incentives, bias towards action, writing is thinking). Here are examples of programs using it: * https://themoai.org/work-life-balance https://themoai.org/work-life-balance * https://themoai.org/intentional-technology https://themoai.org/intentional-technology [0] https://themoai.org https://themoai.org