The Four Kinds of Mistakes One way to categorize mistakes is into these categories:
- Stupid: Absurdly dumb things that just happen. Stubbing your toe, dropping your pizza on your neighbor's fat cat or poking yourself in the eye with a banana. - Simple: Mistakes that are avoidable but your sequence of decisions made inevitable. Having the power go out in the middle of your party because you forgot to pay the rent, or running out of beer at said party because you didn't anticipate the number of guests. - Involved: Mistakes that are understood but require effort to prevent. Regularly arriving late to work/friends, eating fast food for lunch every day, or going bankrupt at your start-up company because of your complete ignorance of basic accounting. - Complex: Mistakes that have complicated causes and no obvious way to avoid next time. Examples include making tough decisions that have bad results, relationships that fail, or other unpleasant or unsatisfying outcomes to important things. (I'm sure you can come up with other categories: that's fantastic, please share them here <http://www.scottberkun.com/contact>. But these are the ones you're stuck with for the rest of this essay). [image: How to Identify and Learn from Your Mistakes] I'm leaving all philosophical questions about mistakes up to you. One person's pleasure is another person's mistake: decide for yourself. Maybe you enjoy stabbing your neighbor's cat with a banana, who knows. We all do things we know are bad in the long term, but are oh so good in the short term. So regardless of where you stand, I'm working with you. However mistakes are defined in your personal philosophy this essay should help you learn from them. Learning from mistakes that fall into the first two categories (Stupid & Simple) is easy, but shallow. Once you recognize the problem and know the better way, you should be able to avoid similar mistakes. Or in some cases you'll realize that no matter what you do once in a while you'll do stupid things (e.g. even Einstein stubbed his toes). But these kinds of mistakes are not interesting. The lessons aren't deep and it's unlikely they lead you to learn much about yourself or anything else. For example compare these two mistakes: - My use of dual part harmony for the 2nd trumpets in my orchestral composition for the homeless children's shelter benefit concert overpowered the intended narrative of the violins. - I got an Oreo stuck in my underwear. The kind of mistakes you make define you. The more interesting the mistakes, the more interesting the life. If your biggest mistakes are missing reruns of tv-shows or buying the wrong lottery ticket you're not challenging yourself enough to earn more interesting mistakes. And since there isn't much to learn from simple and stupid mistakes, most people try to minimize their frequency and how much time we spend recovering from them. Their time is better spent learning from bigger mistakes. But if we habitually or compulsively make stupid mistakes, then what we really have is an involved mistake. -- **** <http://groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/worldmalayaliclub/> *வாழிய செந்தமிழ்! வாழ்க நற்றமிழர்!* *வாழிய பாரதமணித் திருநாடு!* *V a n a k k a m S u b b u * <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sometimeonthenet/join> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
