Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.~Winston Churchill
Before I moved from suburbs to the city in 2010, I worked in the a small department of a family-owned law firm that was consistently listed as one of the best places to work in the city, for good reason. (OK, I will spill: It’s Periscope.)
We had a saying there that I still refer to whenever I need it (which is often): “It’s okaaaayyyy to be wrong!” When someone discovered that she had made a mistake, she would raise her hand in the air and say, “I was wrong; it’s okay to be wrong.”
There was no blame. There was no asking whose fault it was and firing them or making them feel bad. It was a culture of acceptance of mistakes.
This allowed us to learn from them and improve.
We talked about our mistakes — what they were, how they happened and how we could avoid making them in the future. We talked about how we could do better, and because we treated them as a learning opportunity instead of a shameful failure, our mistakes led to better work.
This has been a tough thing for me to learn.
You Must Be Perfect
My mom did not think it was okay to be wrong.
A few years back when I was visiting my Mum, she loaned me her second car so I wouldn’t have to rent one. I accidentally left one of my liquid ink pens uncapped on the passenger seat.
Fabric sucks the ink out of those things at light speed, and it left a spot about the size of a dime. When I mentioned it to Mom, she said, “It’s a good thing that wasn’t my new car, because if it were, I would be mad.”
I know my mom doesn’t think about this consciously, but the underlying message there is: I value my things more than you. It’s not okay to spill things, break things and otherwise screw up. You must do everything perfectly, or I will get mad.
As an adult, I can look at that message and consciously know that something is wrong with it.
As an adult, I can think of myself as a kid — still trying to figure out how the world works, how my own body works, still growing into my motor skills, my big chubby fingers, my still-developing brain — and realize that I was being subtly told that mistakes were not okay.
And this at a time when it was inevitable that I would make a billion of them.
NEAL LLOYD
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