The Myth of Mistakes: "Secrets of Success" series

"Do not fear mistakes. There are none."

-Miles Davis

Miles Davis was an icon as well as being an iconoclast. He redefined Jazz and Blues and will always be a true legend. Sometime in between making music, he was able to find some deep truths. I read the above quote in college and ALWAYS remembered it. However, it has taken me a while to really live that truth.
 
From a young age, many of us are made painfully aware of our perceived mistakes. We drop a pass, miss a passage from a piece, miss a bill payment, eat junk food. The list of mistakes goes on and on. Reactions from others can compound the feelings of guilt or anger that we may have when we make a mistake such as the "oooooh" of the crowd after a basketball player misses the game winning shot. The list of reactions goes on and on too, but I'd like to offer this:
 
THE SECOND SECRET OF SUCCESS IS THAT THERE ARE NO MISTAKES!
 
Last summer, I found a great book. The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle is an awesome book and I've suggested it to anyone who would listen. In it, Coyle explains that talent is really not all its cracked up to be. He broke it down to three vital components of so-called talent.

1) Deliberate Practice
2) Ignition/Motivation
3)  Master Coaching

The book is well worth the read but I wanted to mention an awesome blog post by Coyle. In his post "The 0.25 Second that makes all the difference" he recounts a story of the audition process of the Bolshoi Ballet Company.

Here's an excerpt from his blog:

But there’s another way of thinking about error, and it begins with a story I heard recently about Marina Semyonova, a master teacher at the Bolshoi Ballet in the fifties.

The story goes like this: Every year, Semyonova would hold a tryout for the Bolshoi, which was (and still is) one of the world’s greatest ballet troupes. You can imagine the scene: dozens of brilliant young dancers milling about, years of experience holstered and ready, their dreams on the line.

At first, the tryout would proceed like any other: the dancers would try to show their abilities and vast repertoires. But then Semyonova would surprise them. She would stop the audition and teach them one new move – something they’ve never tried. They weren’t big complex moves – to the contrary, they were quite simple. It was as if the top-level audition suddenly was replaced by a beginners’ class.

The beginners’ class section took only a few minutes. But it was by far the most important moment of the audition, because by the time it was over Semyonova knew precisely which dancers to pick and which to pass over. And as the record shows, she proved to be right far more often than not.

Semyonova wasn’t a neuroscientist, but she was onto something. She wasn’t interested in measuring levels of skill – which changes over time and can be frustratingly unpredictable. She was zeroing in on a tiny slice of time that makes a massive difference in our learning ability — that primal instant right after we make a mistake.

That instant – which this very cool brain-scan experiment shows to be about 0.25 seconds – is a fork in the road; the moment when things tip one way or the other. Either the mistake is judged as a verdict and thus blocked out — or it’s seen as a piece of information to be used. And indeed, in the experiment referenced above, the students who used their mistakes (whose brains processed them deeply in that magical 0.25 seconds) ended up scoring higher than students who didn’t.

I love this for so many reasons. That "mistake" was instant feedback of how much we can better. It's a launch pad to success. However, we've been programmed that they are bad.

Do you dwell on your mistakes? Do you get down on yourself for making an error?

Allow yourself to be open to the possibility that the kind of mistakes that you think exist, really do not. Allow the moment after you've done something that did not go your way to be feedback, acknowledge that it's neither bad or good, own it and move on to do it better next time.

"Do not fear mistakes. There are none"

-Miles Davis