You begin to fail when you deny your mistakes

Mistakes can often be amazing. I’ve shared ideas from people like Thomas J. Watson and Niels Bohr that literally prefer people that have made mistakes.

There’s an important caveat in there though — you must be willing to learn from them.

This was summarized perfectly in Carol Dweck’s book “ Mindset “, where she shared:

“John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them.”

As long as you can admit you’ve made a mistake, you can learn from it.

If you start hiding mistakes and pretending they didn’t happen, you’ll look better in the short run but fail to learn a lesson that could make you far better in the long run.

Originally published at https://www.mickmel.com on April 24, 2022.