In doing research for this month’s blog posts, I came across a calendar that noted December’s national awareness days. There were more than a few off-the-wall ones, such as National Microwave Oven Day, National Rhubarb Vodka Day and National Wear your Pearls Day. But the one that really piqued my interest falls on December 8. It’s equally as strange as the others yet one I could make somewhat relevant to the job world: National Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day. I know this sounds crazy, but bear with me here for a second.
Have you ever wished you could go back in time and redo something at work? Maybe change the way you performed a task that got you in trouble or undo a bad decision you made under pressure? I have definitely done this, and I feel like most people have, too. Even though those things in the past are, well, in the past and can’t possibly be changed, there is still some good that can come out of them. By pretending to be a time traveler and revisiting past mistakes, you are able to reevaluate situations with a clear mind, making it easier to change your actions going forward.
In an excerpt from the essay collection “Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds,” writer and speaker Scott Berkun explores how to best learn from your mistakes. The first step in his process is to admit it was you who made the mistake. “As soon as you start blaming other people (or the universe itself), you distance yourself from any possible lesson,” he writes. “But if you courageously stand up and honestly say, ‘This is my mistake and I am responsible,’ the possibilities for learning will move towards you.” Berkun goes onto write that his advice is opposite of the cultural assumptions we have about mistakes and failure, which is that they are shameful things. “We’re taught in school, in our families, or at work to feel guilty about failure and to do whatever we can to avoid mistakes,” he writes. “What’s missing in many people’s beliefs about success is the fact that the more challenging the goal, the more frequent and difficult setbacks will be. The larger your ambitions, the more dependent you will be on your ability to overcome and learn from your mistakes.”
Berkun said learning from your mistakes requires three you to do three important things:
- Put yourself in situations where you can make interesting mistakes
- Have the self-confidence to admit to them
- Be courageous about making changes
In order to truly learn from your mistakes, Berkun suggests working backwards to moments, hours or days before the actual event so you can see all of the contributing factors that lead to the mistake; if you don’t, you likely won’t learn all of the possible lessons. The more complex the mistake, the further back you’ll need to go and the more careful and open-minded you need to be in your own investigation. Berkun says you also might need to bring in an objective outsider to help sort things out, as you might be too close to the situation.
Here are some questions Berkun says to ask yourself while you’re investigating the situation:
- What was the probable sequence of events?
- Were their multiple small mistakes that led to a larger one?
- Were there any erroneous assumptions made?
- Did we have the right goals? Were we trying to solve the right problem?
- Was it possible to have recognized bad assumptions earlier?
- Was there information we know now that would have been useful then?
- What would we do differently if in this exact situation again?
- How can we avoid getting into situations like this? (What was the kind of situation we wanted to be in?)
- Was this simply unavoidable given all of the circumstances? A failure isn’t a mistake if you were attempting the impossible.
- Has enough time passed for us to know if this is a mistake or not?
If you answer the above questions honestly, you’ll get a clear understanding of how the mistake happened. By analyzing your answers, you can piece together systems for avoiding the same mistake in the future and also address patterns of behavior that eventually lead to making the mistake. My suggestion to you is one that I will be implementing myself, and that is to save these questions somewhere that is easily accessible. Next time I make a mistake–either at work or in my personal life–you bet I will pretend to be a time traveller to figure out what occurred and how to make the appropriate changes to stop it from happening again.
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