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For many people, mistakes have a negative connotation. They are perceived as obstacles rather than opportunities on our path to success. Mistakes are often seen as costly, inconvenient and unacceptable, something that cannot be made.
However, with every mistake, especially new ones, a valuable lesson remains to be learned. This is a truth I recently discovered in a conversation with a rabbi after I was late one day picking up my children from Hebrew school. Despite my tardiness, the rabbi called me “Tzadik.” Tzadik, which comes from the same root as the words “Tzedek” and “tzedakah,” literally means “one who is upright and just” when translated from Hebrew. I was surprised when the rabbi told me this because being righteous seemed incongruent with my actions. I later learned that the word has another meaning in Yiddish: a tzadik is someone who makes new mistakes.
This revelation underscored the inherently transformative potential of embracing mistakes as catalysts for growth. But to harness the growth and success potential of bugs, especially new ones, we need to do some essential things.
Related: How can making mistakes help us stay entrepreneurial?
1. Avoid bug hoarding
Work culture often stigmatizes mistakes as failures, fostering a culture of concealment and fear. People tend to hide their mistakes from their managers and teams because they fear they will come back to haunt them during the next performance review. This phenomenon, which I call “bug hoarding,” inhibits individual and organizational progress by suppressing transparency and hindering innovation.
Rather, we must understand the role that errors play. This role goes beyond being an indication or measure of failure, misunderstanding, negligence or incompetence or serving as an opportunity to negatively criticize or correct others. The role of mistakes is to teach us; provide opportunities to solve problems and learn new skills and knowledge that we may not yet have; and to redirect and point us in a different, informed and potentially more successful direction that we would not have discovered without that failure.
2. The two by two model
At my company, Cloud for Good, we embrace a culture of learning. We recognize that mistakes are not cases of failure, but rather opportunities for growth. Every quarter, our leadership team meets to review two processes that went well and two that didn’t. This is a time for us where, instead of taking the direct and perhaps easier route of pointing fingers or blaming mistakes made, we intentionally focus on the learning aspect of these mistakes so that we can develop and implement operational decisions about how to avoid the same mistakes or repeat success in our next projects.
Errors must be recognized and addressed to inform us how to make appropriate adjustments and move toward improvement. While it is true that occasions of success and achievement are learning opportunities, so are mistakes, no matter how challenging they may be.
3. Make new mistakes
Cultivating a growth mindset is critical to addressing and harnessing the growth potential of mistakes. This perspective reframes setbacks as opportunities for learning and development. To make new mistakes and not repeat old ones, a person must get up, recognize the mistake, reflect, learn and try again. This is a very powerful concept.
As human beings, it is not always easy to admit and accept that we made a mistake, especially serious ones. However, by creating a space and culture where we can recognize our humanity and reframe our mistakes as part of our growth and path to success, we will no longer be limited or held back by our mistakes or fear of failure. This also helps foster a space where, by focusing more intentionally on lessons learned from mistakes and less on criticizing them, people can grow in resilience and develop new skills to put them on a better path to success and innovation.
Related: 6 things you gain by accepting failure and learning from mistakes
4. Accept failure as part of success
Success is much more powerful and meaningful when we welcome the space for failure. By inviting failure into conversations, we challenge the norm of celebrating only the positive side of success. This “fear of failure” can often lead to poor collaboration and high turnover rates, something that can stifle the success of any organization.
That is why I believe that failure is not the antithesis of success in the entrepreneurial path, but rather an essential component. As Winston Churchill said: “Success is the ability to move from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm.” I firmly believe that one of the reasons my company was able to grow from a one-bedroom apartment to over 250 employees is our ability to reframe and welcome mistakes and failures in our work without automatically dismissing or condemning them, starting for telling people not to be accumulators of mistakes, extract valuable lessons and knowledge from our mistakes and continue moving forward with enthusiasm. And when new mistakes are made, we repeat that process to get closer to achieving our goals.
Success is not only driven by our experience and knowledge, but also by what we have learned along the way, including what we learned from our failures. I wouldn’t have learned a compelling new perspective on the innovative potential of making new mistakes if I hadn’t been late picking up my kids from Hebrew School. It’s a mistake I learned and don’t want to make again, but it also became a significant opportunity to learn and understand why embracing and learning from mistakes and failure in our work and lives is essential to accessing powerful paths. . of growth, innovation and success.
