Quote: Eleanor Roosevelt on not regretting mistakes

“I have never regretted even my mistakes. They all added to my understanding of other human beings, and I came out in the end a more tolerant, understanding, and charitable person.” - The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Failure guru Amy Edmondson deconstructs the Healthcare.gov fiasco

Amid all the breathless news coverage of the failed rollout of the Obamacare Healthcare.gov website, we now have some genuine analysis, courtesy of one of my heroes, Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School ("The Mistakes Behind Healthcare.gov Are Probably Lurking In Your Company, Too"). She may be more qualified than anyone to weigh in, given her deep research experience in learning from mistakes and failure in very complex situations (including healthcare). A couple of potent excerpts:

Healthcare.gov is a good example of the importance of learning small and fast, rather than rolling out a risky new product or service launch all at once. Cycling out in phases includes the expectation of early failures – and demands all hands on deck to learn from them along the way. A roll-out, in contrast, implies that something is all set, ready to go — like a carpet. All it needs is a bit of momentum to propel it forward. For complex initiatives, of course, this is simply not the case. Getting people motivated enough to change is not the real challenge; it’s getting them engaged enough to learn — to become part of a discovery process.

and...

Managers must make it clear that they understand that excellent performance does not mean not making mistakes — it means learning quickly from mistakes and sharing the lessons widely.

What can we learn from "Disaster Lit"?

Interesting interview over at HBR.org of author Neil Swidey, about his upcoming book, Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness, about a diving disaster in Boston Harbor in the 1990s. In the interview, Swidey's book is lumped into a genre called "disaster lit" including books like Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm. Interestingly, Swidey points out Krakauer's assertion in Into Thin Air that "The urge to catalogue the myriad blunders in order to ‘learn from the mistakes’ is for the most part an exercise in denial and self-deception."

And while that may seem to be an indictment of this site, I tend to agree with Krakauer's assertion - if you are talking about disasters that occur when attempting to climb Mount Everest. His theme is that amateurs have no place climbing Everest, because of the inherent, uncontrollable risk the mountain and environment offer. The risk in climbing Everest is not an issue of inadequate human design - Everest is simply more powerful than your plan. Trying to insure against disaster by studying other's mistakes causes you to take a much larger risk - underestimating the mountain and the power of randomness.

We can learn from many classes of mistakes and disasters, when we make the same mistake over and over again, when we ignore "near misses," when we lack a clear objective. But not all.

I would agree that there's little to learn from the Everest disasters that can help you avoid future ones, if you are inclined to challenge that mountain. If the mountain wants to take you, it will.

Ashley Good of AdmittingFailure.com discusses learning from failure

This is the keynote presentation Ashley Good gave at FailCon Oslo back in June. Ashley is a fellow traveler who helps companies and non-governmental organizations tell their failure stories so they can learn and improve. Her site AdmittingFailure.com includes stories and discussions of learning from failure. Her talk is a great reinforcement of many points we discuss at this site. Enjoy!



Money quote from a hockey coach to a player who was focused on playing perfectly: "You are not falling enough... practice is for finding your edge." Failure is a way to test our limits and understand what we have to do to get better.

One of Ashley's pieces of work is the annual Failure Report published by the Canadian NGO Engineers Without Borders. You can access its 2012 Failure Report here.

Marilyn vos Savant: Cheating "makes it appear you are more proficient than you really are"

Marilyn vos Savant's advice column in Parade Magazine has been a guilty pleasure of mine for years. But today's Q+A seemed apt for our site, and has echoes of an earlier post of ours, "No Mulligans."

Question: Moralizing aside, can you give me any persuasive reason why my friends and I shouldn’t cheat at school whenever we’re sure we’re not going to get caught?

Marilyn: Aside from what may happen if you get caught anyway? Possibly the best reason not to cheat is that doing so may make it appear that you are more proficient in a subject than you actually are. This will lead you into increasingly deeper water without knowing how to swim well enough. As you move into academic areas or courses that are over your head (because you didn’t master the foundations for whatever reason, such as not studying as much as you should have), you will find yourself in academic trouble that no amount of cheating can solve.

Idea to capitalize on mistakes and failure: a "brilliant mistakes" contest

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with Paul Schoemaker, author of the book "Brilliant Mistakes: Finding Success on the Far Side of Failure" as well as co-author of the HBR Article that was one of the inspirations for this site ("The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes," with Robert Gunther). In our discussion I was reminded that, as part of the events surrounding the publication of "Brilliant Mistakes," the Wharton Digital Press created a Brilliant Mistakes contest, which asked entrants to describe "an error that they committed and recognized as a potential source of learning or innovation, and then leveraged as a new concept or idea that helped transform a project or organization."

The winning entry came from Dr. Stephen Salzman of UCLA Medical School, who did a cardiology experiment on athletes and found that his hypothesis was 180 degrees wrong, "forever changing his perspective, not only in the area of adrenaline, but throughout cardiology."

What do you think? Would contests like this within companies help them capitalize on mistakes and failure better? Why or why not?

Improving education by leveraging errors and failure

I was very happy when Bengt-Arne Vedin reached out via email last week. Professor Vedin, a fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, is exploring the concept of learning via failure, and shared two papers he's authored on the subject. One is published in the July issue of the Journal of Arts & Humanities, and is entitled "Teaching & Learning By Way of Failure?" Near to my heart, he shares personal stories of learning by difficult experience, including this one:

In another field of physics, a new teaching laboratory had been established, with new exercises and experiments employing brand new instruments for advanced and topical measurements, intended to demonstrate advanced physics of a articular type (nuclear physics), reduced to practice. Novel, new is the key word here, novel as in untested: my colleague and I constituted the first group of two to run the gauntlet through all these novelties; we became the guinea pigs and also the troubleshooters, because nothing much worked as it had been designed or expected to. Electricity did not come on, or it went through our bodies, all by chance. Instruments measured something else than what had been intended. In fairness, the professor and his assistants showed us immense gratitude, and gave us good grades, which we had qualified for, though in a way inadvertently, forced to; not by design.

Professor Vedin's general argument is that learning can be accelerated by providing challenges to the student; for example, incomplete instructions, errors introduced in problems to be found and fixed, missing pieces to be filled in. These challenges prevent students from mindlessly memorizing and force them to engage their creativity, with the hopeful result that they learn the material more deeply. There are lots more interesting assertions in the paper, including a recommendation to capture and regularly reflect on mistakes and failure (something that has also been suggested in this space).

What do you think? Could this model improve the learning process?

Learning from failures (and successes) requires different IT systems

A few years ago, I worked with a colleague tasked with improving his company’s project management outcomes (I was going to say processes, but on thinking about it they asked him to improve the performance and results).

He’s focusing on lessons learned, as you might expect. The company has done lots of projects; surely there are many lessons within those projects that could help improve things going forward? And there are. But my colleague has found that the inability to effectively capture and share these lessons prevents the organization as a whole from getting much if any value out of their past experiences.

[A Harvard Business Review article, "The Experience Trap," emphasizes why project management, in particular, is prone to repeating the same mistakes over and over again.]

I was thinking about my colleague as I was reading this recent article in “Strategy + Business” entitled, “Are You Killing Enough Ideas?” by Zia Khan and Jon Katzenbach. The article discusses innovation, not project management, but this section in particular resonated with me and spurred my connection with project management lessons:

…When there is an ineffective balance between formal and informal structures, it often shows up as an inability to manage bad ideas effectively. After a formal decision has been made to advance some ideas but not to pursue others, the company expends considerable effort to plan the next steps for the winners. But no one thinks actively of planning next steps for the losing ideas, to put them to rest, free up their supporting resources, and (ideally) identify and share any lessons or insights gleaned from the experience.

One quibble with this otherwise excellent paper: why is identifying and sharing lessons and insights from experience an “ideal” situation? It should be business as usual.

Significant corporate initiatives, whether they are innovation ideas or IT projects, are expensive in capital, resources and opportunity cost. The experience, whether the project is ultimately a success or not, is hard won and valuable. It should be mandatory to capture and share these lessons and insights.

There are several barriers my colleague faces in trying to institutionalize the creation and use of lessons learned. “Let’s move on” is one of the most pernicious ones. After a difficult project, people are inclined to look ahead rather than backward, to forget difficult or painful experiences rather than mine them for lessons. (As mentioned in chapter 6 of the book, lessons sometimes emerge years after an experience.) Organizations, of course, in their eagerness to place blame, facilitate people’s instincts to hide or blur what happened in the case of a failed project.

My colleague’s company has a very open and positive culture; they are more equipped than most companies at overcoming the reluctance to share. Yet they still face a significant obstacle: their information systems are not up to the task of gathering, sharing, sorting and consuming lessons-learned material.

They capture lessons in Word forms and documents, and store them in file folders on a shared drive. And they are not surprised when no one can find anything. Dumping valuable lessons on a shared drive may have a slightly positive use for whoever writes the lessons down; at least that person learns a bit more from the retelling. But certainly it’s of no use to anyone else.

Lessons-learned need enterprise 2.0-type tools that capture narrative data, signifiers and tags; allow users to “like,” pass along, add to, and otherwise annotate original stories; and browse through, search and connect related stories. That’s what my colleague needs, and that’s what every organization that wants to “ideally” learn from both good and bad experiences needs as well.

Steve Martin: Naïveté is necessary to developing your creativity

Another great quote from "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life." There are echoes here of the entrepreneur's necessary delusion referred to in Dan Isenberg's "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value."

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

Admitting Failure's "Fail Forward" initiative among 24 finalists for HBR/McKinsey prize

We referred to Admitting Failure (part of Engineers Without Borders Canada) in a prior post, and now the group announces that its "Fail Forward" initiative is among 24 finalists for the Innovating Innovation Challenge sponsored by Harvard Business Review and McKinsey.

Fail Forward's IIC page features three "Failure Reports," annual reports outlining failures and lessons from them for 2010, 2011 and 2012. These reports are excellent documents on embracing and learning from failure, and I recommend you check them out.

Congratulations to Ashley Good and her colleagues at EWB Canada on this honor, and best of luck in the finals!

My 2013 resolutions - task prioritization and less smartphoning

In the Mistake Bank book, I discuss how to discern patterns of mistakes and how to take action to disrupt those patterns. A good time to reflect on mistake patterns and decide on changes is at year end. Given that it's still January, I thought I'd share my reflections and decisions for the upcoming year.

[Note: I do a daily online journal that captures accomplishments, mistakes, etc., and that is the tool I use for my year-end reflection. Alan Henry at Lifehacker has a nice overview of options in this area. If you'd like an invitation to use the beta version of my tool, email me at mistakebank (at) caddellinsightgroup (dot) com.]

The first pattern I noticed was that while I accomplished a lot, many of the accomplishments were not in my most important and strategic areas. So, a lot of things got done, but frequently they were not the most important things. While I was reflecting on this, I came across Elizabeth Grace Saunders' piece "How to Allocate Your Time and Effort" on the HBR Blog Network. Saunders' post outlines a simple way to rank to-do items by their importance, and then allocate time in priority order. Simply put, the most important tasks (the "I" or investment tasks) get worked early in the day, and early in the week. The medium tasks ("N" or neutral) are done next, and whatever time is left is for the "O" (optimize) tasks.

For me, "I" tasks include work on the book, strategic work for my main job, and things I need to do for the family. "N" tasks are to-dos for colleagues, tasks that support strategic work, etc. "O" tasks include making travel arrangements, expense reporting, and status reporting.

Saunders' method forces me to spend time on the most important tasks first, and to get less important tasks done in less time. I'm happy with the results so far.

The second pattern I saw was that my stress level was higher than I would like, despite eating healthy, exercising regularly, and taking family time. I soon zeroed in on a culprit: my smartphone.

As I reflected, I saw that the last thing I would do at night before sleep was check the smartphone. I would check it again immediately upon waking. This included emailing, reviewing the RSS reader, Facebook, etc. I would often page through Twitter while I was shaving. The end result of all this engagement was little downtime before sleep, and immediate stimulation on waking, rather than easing into the day. Instead of a calming, sensible routine, I was multitasking, raising my stress level first thing in the morning.

I set a rule. No smartphone after 9pm, and no smartphone in the morning until I went up to the office after breakfast and the kids were at school. I feel better already.

Two changes; those are my resolutions for 2013.

One thing I wanted to point out about these changes. They are both simple and concrete. The first requires adopting a simple method. The second is a straightforward rule. There are few decisions or options. As I state in the book, it's a lot easier to adopt concrete, specific, simple changes, than to try to change a general mindset. That is to say, it's easier to follow a rule like "no smartphone after 9pm," than to succeed with a resolution such as "use the smartphone less."

What are your resolutions this year? How is it going so far?

More reasons to forgive yourself when you make mistakes

Over on 99u.com this week, Heidi Grant Halvorson writes about "Why You Should Give Yourself Permission to Screw Up." I discussed Halvorson's piece on self-compassion vs. self-esteem a few weeks ago, and this is another good one. Halvorson writes:

People approach any task with one of two mindsets: what I call the "Be-Good" mindset, where your focus is on proving that you have a lot of ability and already know what you're doing, and the "Get-Better" mindset, where your focus is on developing ability. You can think of it as the difference between wanting to prove that you are smart, and wanting to get smarter.

The problem with the Be-Good mindset is that it tends to cause problems when we are faced with something unfamiliar or difficult. We start worrying about making mistakes, because mistakes mean that we lack ability, and this creates a lot of anxiety and frustration.

Anxiety and frustration, in turn, undermine performance by compromising our working memory, disrupting the many cognitive processes we rely on for creative and analytical thinking.

Also, when we focus too much on doing things perfectly (i.e., being good), we don't engage in the kind of exploratory thinking and behavior that creates new knowledge and innovation.

The "Be-Good" and "Get-Better" mindsets are identical to Carol Dweck's Fixed and Growth mindsets. The "Get Better" mindset is much more useful when approaching new tasks. One thing I, as a recovering "Be-Gooder," have started to come to grips with is this: I notice my mistakes and feel them more acutely than anyone else.

So if you're trying new things, forgive yourself when you make mistakes. Colleagues will forget them, especially if you put the learnings to use immediately. Soon, they will only see your expertise. The missteps that built that expertise will fade away.


Disclosure: 99u.com occasionally publishes things I write.

Small business takes prior mistakes to heart

This is from the wonderful "She Owns It" blog in the New York Times, by Adriana Gardella. Ms. Gardella talked to her women's owner group at the end of 2012, gathering some of the lessons they had learned that year. One notable story came from Bari Jay fashion owner Susan Parker:

[Ms. Parker] said she was most pleased that her company had gone from being reactive to proactive. “Every year, we seem to learn from our mistakes and try to plan and do things better,” she said. For example, December is typically when Bari Jay starts shipping its dresses for the spring season (there are spring and fall seasons).

Normally, when Christmas rolls around, she said, she worries that shipping may spill over into January and that stores may no longer accept Bari Jay’s dresses. This year, however, Bari Jay shipped most of its dress samples in November. This meant that stores had more time to re-order dresses and also that stores that budget poorly were less likely to run out of money before ordering.

Carol Bartz on what you can learn from a bad boss, and watch out for that flying tissue box!

Having a lousy boss is one of the most unpleasant experiences possible in the workplace. Is it possible, though, that there is a silver lining in having a bad boss? Carol Bartz, the former CEO of Yahoo and Autodesk, thinks so. In the way that "mistakes make deep imprints," your experiences with a bad boss can help you learn what not to do when you rise to that level yourself. Bartz described her experiences at an event at Wharton's San Francisco Campus. They were summarized in an article in Knowledge@Wharton:

While universally despised, the dreaded bad boss, said Bartz, can teach his or her unfortunate employees a great deal. "Think about the good bosses you had. You remember that they're good, but you don't know exactly why. But with a bad boss, you remember every detail about whatever [he or she] did. You really have it in sharp focus. Not that you should run off and be bad managers, but we often can be shaped more by some of the negative things that happen in our lives, like a bad boss. And of course I have a little bit of Silicon Valley in me, which says, 'A bad boss will soon move on to be somebody else's bad boss, so just wait him out.' But if you happen to be in a business where they wait around for 10 years, then maybe you've got to move out first."

Being assigned to a bad boss may not be your mistake, but it's a mistake nonetheless, so you might as well learn from it. And keep your poise, like this woman in a NY Times piece by Phyllis Korkki:

Noreen P. Denihan is an executive assistant who sees her job as managing the life of her boss, Donald J. Gogel, chief executive of the private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. As such, she has no problem taking care of some of his personal responsibilities.

Ms. Denihan has been an assistant since 1976 and can remember, in one of her previous workplaces, when someone threw a box of tissues at her because the type she had bought would irritate his nose.

“The box hit the floor and I just stepped over it” as if nothing had happened, she said.

When people fly off the handle in my presence, I tell myself that it's because of their own issues and struggles, rather than anything I did. I tell myself that, but I still get offended and angry. I wish I had Noreen Denihan's equanimity. She is a rock star.

Excerpt from The Mistake Bank book

I've mentioned a Mistake Bank book which I'm currently working on. It's titled, "The Mistake Bank: How to Succeed by Forgiving Your Mistakes and Embracing Your Failures." I have sent a draft of the book to a friend who is editing it for me. Michael Morris is working on illustrations for the book and, most immediately, I will be running a Kickstarter campaign to underwrite the first print run of the book.

Please stay tuned for more information on the Kickstarter project. Please consider supporting the project and sharing the project with your friends and colleagues. Here's a taste of the book from the Introduction:

Many years ago I worked with some great people at GTE in Tampa, Florida. I was on a six-month assignment and, during my last week there, I had a ton of things to do to get ready for my next move to Boston.

That Thursday, I had agreed to meet my friend Phil for lunch, but before that, I rushed over to another part of town to return my cable box. I ran in, dropped the box off, and ran back to my car. There was no car in the space in front of me, so instead of backing out, I zipped forward.

When the tires hit the concrete curb at the front of the parking space, I knew I was in trouble. I took my foot off the gas, but the car didn't stop until the tires had run up and over and the underside of the car had fallen hard onto the curb.

I backed up over the curb again, then out of the parking space. There was a grinding noise from the bottom of the car and it wouldn't go faster than 20 miles per hour. I carefully creeped along the side roads for several miles till I reached the dealer. It took a while for them to look at the car and let me know what needed to be fixed (thankfully, it wasn't bad).

By now I was terribly late for lunch. I went to a pay phone (see how long ago it was?) and called Phil at the restaurant. "I am so sorry, but I won't make it for lunch. You see, my car..."

Phil interrupted. "You need to get to the restaurant now. There are 25 people here for your goodbye lunch."

I hung up, called a cab, and eventually made it to the restaurant. In the dining room, a long stretch of tables was full of empty drink glasses, plates, and about a dozen people who were still there after 90 minutes of waiting. It was a memorable good-bye lunch, for them as well as for me. 

* * *

There are a few lessons I took away from that experience. One is that, as stated by Wharton School researcher Paul Schoemaker, “mistakes make a deep imprint.” I can remember that story in vivid detail more than twenty-five years later. Even as I write this, I can hear the sound of the car’s undercarriage crunching against the curb.

Another is that rushing doesn’t necessarily get things done faster. In fact, it can slow you down significantly.

The final lesson is that friends are precious gifts. That my colleagues would go to the trouble of planning this elaborate surprise lunch, and then hang around long after they’d finished eating to wait for my arrival, is something I’ll never forget.

Three life lessons. All from just one mistake.

It takes two to tango, also for feedback

There are lots of ways to learn from mistakes - through a precipitating event, through finding patterns, through unpacking a failure. One of the quickest and cheapest ways to learn from mistakes is to get and use the feedback of colleagues, customers and friends.

Yet, it's a tool that's rarely used. Why? There are two reasons.

One is that people don't like to give feedback. It's personally risky: You don't know if it will be welcomed. You don't know if it will be understood, and you don't know if it will be used. Plus, it's extra work. Today, I was at a grocery store near the lake house where we're vacationing. I had to maneuver the cart through 8 or 10 product displays that narrowed the aisles to the point where they were barely wider than the shopping cart. I thought that the manager should know that the store was hard to get through, and that this was an annoyance to customers. But did I seek her out and tell her? No.

With people you know and will see again, giving feedback can be explosive - and can backfire. People can view negative feedback as a judgment on their performance (sometimes it is), or as a distraction ("I know what I'm doing!" which is something I say on occasion to people helping me - sorry Maura!). The motives of the feedback-giver can be questioned ("is that person out to get me?").

So giving feedback is not only extra work, it's thankless and even dangerous work. And why is that? Because of reason number two:

People don't like to receive feedback. Negative feedback, if we're not ready for it, attacks what we like to keep hidden. It challenges our vision of ourselves. It's like listening to a tape recording of our own speech ("Is that what I really sound like?").

But think of this: if you can get feedback on an idea, a project, or your management style, you have valuable information you can put to use. For free!

And if you get feedback from a diverse group of people, it will be easier to recognize things that require fixes (as compared to trivial issues or matters of perspective).

Compare that to the cost of failure, or the cost of making the same mistakes over again till you realize it yourself.

If you want more feedback, you have to make yourself open to it, solicit it, appreciate it, and put it to use when you get it. That will give the signal to others that giving you feedback is safe and effective. Then, like magic, you will get more.

Another personal story: a few years ago, I was struggling to manage a new group that had been assigned to me. I sensed that I wasn't connecting with them. At the end of the year, when I was already doing my own self-assessment, I asked the group to individually think about my own performance and come up with one or two recommendations that would help me improve. I promised to listen to the recommendations and not argue about them.

I met with each team member individually, and they "laid it on me." It couldn't have been easy for them. And it wasn't easy for me. It was quite difficult to listen to all that feedback.

But I learned two things I was doing which really bugged my team members.* And they were easy to fix. I was so happy with the outcome of this exercise, and I believe it helped my team and me become a stronger workgroup. I remember the whole process vividly, nearly 10 years later.

I can also say that I haven't done it since then, even though I realize that it was valuable.

In conclusion: Inviting and using feedback is difficult. But it's very useful. Try it, and try it again. Make it a habit. It will pay off hugely for you.


* Here are the two things I learned from my team's feedback:

1. "You often curse in the office and that makes us uncomfortable" - that really bothered several people on the team. I worked on that; it was easier than I thought it'd be.

2. "When I come into your office for a meeting, you don't pay complete attention to me." - this was true; it was easy to get distracted by the Blackberry or email. So I started moving away from my computer and putting my phone aside when I had a meeting.

20-year-old learns valuable lesson: Just having a big idea isn't enough

This is from a New York Times piece discussing venture capitalist Peter Thiel's Fellowship program. The program selects 20 entrepreneurs under the age of 20 each year to receive a $100,000 grant to pursue their ideas. One winner in particular has learned some lessons that took me many years to grasp:

John Burnham had bold plans to start a company to extract minerals from outer space. He quickly learned that $100,000 was not nearly enough to do that, so he came up with a new idea: creating models to make capital-intensive projects like space exploration economically viable. That idea also floundered, so now Mr. Burnham is figuring out what to do next. "It's been really eye-opening for me to realize that just because you have a big idea doesn't mean that's all it's going to take to make something happen," he said.

"Wrong thinking" is a key part of imagination

From Good Magazine's article, "Learning to 'Think Wrong' Could Be the Key to the Right Answers":

We’ve all been in group brainstorm sessions where everyone is shouting out ideas but none of them really solve the problem at hand. It sounds counterintuitive, but social designer Marc O'Brien says trying to come up with right answers shuts down our creativity. The key to generating truly innovative ideas, he says, is learning how to challenge the status quo—which is why he's busy trying to teach people how to "think wrong"

People "need to keep their imagination alive and not feel like they need to be right all the time," says O'Brien, who facilitates a workshop series called "How to Think Wrong." That's difficult because by the time we're adults, we're afraid of failure. People tend to do things—including thinking of ideas—the same way over and over again because it feels safe. Yet working within our comfort zone renders us unable to approach problems with a truly fresh perspective....

"If students learned from the time they entered elementary school that it's ok to make mistakes and take what works and build off of that and continue to be curious," he says, they'd never lose their imagination.

Carol Dweck - fixed mindsetters take outsized risks

Carol Dweck is one of the thinkers that continues to inspire me. Her insights on learning (in her words, between people with fixed mindsets and growth mindsets) sheds light on how some of us refuse to learn from mistakes, and how others absorb the lessons and succeed all the more. [This is a marvelous graphic illustrating the two mindsets.]

Her recent post on HBR.com, "Warning Signs of an Unhealthy Appetite for Risk," discusses how the trap of the fixed mindset, in which talents are perceived to be innate, not developed, can lead people to overestimate their abilities and desire to show off - a cocktail for risky behavior.

The piece also had a quote that got my mind working:

In another study with David Nussbaum, students at a top university were told they had done poorly on a test of their abilities, and were then offered the chance to see and learn from the strategies used by people who had taken the test before them. What did they do? Those with a growth mindset chose to look at the strategies of people who had done far better than they had — they wanted to improve. But those with a fixed mindset chose to look at the strategies of people who had done worse than they had. Why? They wanted to feel superior. And after doing so, they reported that they, indeed, now had a high opinion of their abilities. People with a fixed mindset ignore the warning signs.

This reminded me of a story from a time when I certainly had a very fixed mindset - in college.

As a senior, I had reserved one of my two pass-fail classes for my final semester. I chose Drawing I. It seemed like a change of pace from my engineering curriculum, and a friend was taking it too. Why not? I thought.

I was convinced that I sucked at drawing. And my first drawings lived down to that self-image. So I developed a strategy. (Which wasn't to try hard to improve my craft.) Each time we had completed a drawing or sketch, we hung it on the wall and the professor would critique them. I learned very quickly to hang back while everyone posted their drawings. Then I would find the poorest drawing of all, and hang mine next to it.

This strategy had the desired effect: the teacher's critiques were more muted than they would have been if my drawing had been in the company of better ones.

I didn't improve much over the course of the semester - though I did pass. And years later, I regretted not taking more advantage of that opportunity to practice and learn to draw better. But, of course, that was when I had seen the advantage of the growth mindset.

[If you want to see my drawing skills in action, here you are:]

Learning from mistakes requires getting past your emotions

In his book "From Lemons to Lemonade: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Success Out of Your Mistakes," Indiana University professor Dean Shepherd discusses the need to separate actions from emotions to get the most learning from mistakes and failure. In this excerpt, Shepherd writes:

By recognizing that failure can trigger a negative emotional reaction, we realize that learning from failure requires time. It also requires a process of dealing with the emotions generated by failure to learn from the experience. That process, once learned, can become one of your strengths instead of a weakness. It can be a very positive force in your life.

I agree completely. And depending on the magnitude of the failure, that time will be shorter or longer. As I journal mistakes, I can usually come to grips with the trivial ones within a week (the journal is very important for keeping record of these). Deeper ones, such as an unexpected reversal with a sales prospect, take longer - a quarter to a year. And lessons from major setbacks, such as the failure of Shepherd's father-in-law's business (related in the excerpt), take years to absorb.

In the moment, when we realize something has gone wrong, we automatically self-protect - by blaming others, or circumstances, or denying the mistake. But after some time has passed and the hurt has dissipated, we can see what really happened, and what role our actions played in the failure. Our actions and reactions are the only thing we can change going forward, and must be the center of our learning.

[Hat tip to Failure Consulting.]