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For many people, mistakes have a negative connotation. We see them as obstacles fairly than opportunities on our path to success. Mistakes are often seen as costly, inconvenient and unacceptable – something that has no place.
However, a precious lesson might be learned from every mistake – especially a recent one. This is a truth I recently discovered in a conversation with a rabbi when I used to be late one day to pick up my children from Hebrew school. Despite my tardiness, the rabbi called me a “tzaddik.” Tzaddik, which comes from the same root as the words “Chedek” and “Tzedakah”, when translated from Hebrew literally means “one who is just and just.” I used to be shocked when the rabbi told me this because being righteous and just seemed inconsistent with my actions. Later I learned that in Yiddish this word has a different meaning: a tzadik is one who makes recent mistakes.
This finding highlighted the inherent, transformative potential of using mistakes as catalysts for growth. However, to harness the potential for growth and success from mistakes, especially recent ones, we’d like to do a few necessary things.
1. Avoid accumulating bugs
Work culture often stigmatizes mistakes as failures, fostering a culture of secrecy and fear. People tend to hide their mistakes from managers and teams because they fear they shall be hounded during their next performance review. This phenomenon, which I call “error accumulation,” stifles individual and organizational progress, stifling transparency and hindering innovation.
Instead, we’d like to understand the role that errors play. This role goes beyond being an indication or measure of failure, misunderstanding, neglect or incompetence, to being an opportunity to negatively criticize or correct others. The role of mistakes is to teach us; providing opportunities to solve problems and acquire recent skills and knowledge that we may not already have; and redirecting and directing us in a different, conscious, potentially more practical direction that we’d not have discovered without this failure.
2. Two by two model
At my company, Cloud for Good, we have a culture of learning. We realize that mistakes are not failures, but fairly opportunities for growth. Every quarter, our leadership team meets to review two processes that were going well and two that weren’t. This is a time for us where, fairly than taking the direct and perhaps easier route of pointing fingers or shifting blame for the mistakes we make, we intentionally focus on learning from those mistakes so that we are able to develop and implement operational decisions about how to avoid the same mistakes or repeat success in subsequent projects.
Mistakes have to be acknowledged and addressed to inform us how to make appropriate adjustments and progress toward improvement. It is true that opportunities for success and achievement provide opportunities to learn, but so do mistakes – regardless of how difficult they could be.
3. Make recent mistakes
Cultivating a growth mindset is crucial to approaching the potential for growth and capitalizing on it from mistakes. This perspective transforms failures into opportunities for learning and growth. In order to make recent mistakes and not repeat old ones, you would like to get up, admit your mistake, reflect, learn and try again. This is a very powerful concept.
As human beings, it is not all the time easy to admit and accept that we have made a mistake, especially a serious one. However, by creating a space and culture where we are able to as an alternative acknowledge our humanity and reframe our mistakes as part of our growth and journey to success, we are not limited and held back by our mistakes or fear of failure. It also helps create a space where, by focusing more intentionally on learning from mistakes and less on criticizing them, people can increase their resilience and build recent skills to put them on a higher path to success and innovation.
4. Recognize failure as part of success
Success is so much more powerful and meaningful when we welcome the space to fail. By inviting failure into conversations, we query the norm of only celebrating the positive side of success. This “fear of failure” can often lead to poor collaboration and high worker turnover rates, which may stifle the success of any organization.
Therefore, I imagine that failure is not the opposite of success on the entrepreneurial path, but is an necessary element of it. As Winston Churchill said, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without losing enthusiasm.” I firmly imagine that one of the reasons my company has been able to grow from a one-bedroom apartment to over 250 employees is our ability to reframe and accept mistakes and failures in our work without routinely dismissing or condemning them, starting with saying People, do not be error collectors, draw conclusions and precious insights from our mistakes and move forward with enthusiasm. And when recent mistakes are made, we repeat this process to get closer to achieving our goals.
Success comes not only from our expertise and knowledge, but also from what we have learned along the way – including what we have learned from our failures. I would not have learned a fresh and fascinating perspective on the progressive potential of making recent mistakes if I hadn’t been late picking up my kids from Hebrew school. I learned that it was a mistake I didn’t want to make again, but it also became a significant learning opportunity for me and an understanding of why accepting and learning from mistakes and failures in our work and lives is essential to accessing effective paths to growth, innovation and success.