If you, like me, know that you are wrong a lot, keep these three ideas in mind:
Mistakes are both inevitable and useful.
Utility is found in knowledge, not in ignorance.
Learning is another word for mistake.
In real life, the only way to truly learn is by doing: we discover this lesson (the hard way) the day we get out of school.
That day, we find out that what we know (or thought we knew) doesn't always apply to reality. Practical challenges arise and we are forced to find ways to do things and overcome obstacles that are not necessarily in line with what we knew.
Illustrator Harsh Darji explains it in a picture:
Unfortunately, we find out, knowing isn’t doing.
As we go through the process of discovering these new ways of operating we, inevitably, make mistakes.
You can spend years making mistakes (hopefully not repeating the same ones!): you make a mistake, you reflect, you learn from it and you keep going.
When evaluating yourself, another person or a business, “experience” carries some weight as a proxy metric, but far more important is the intentional learning that people and organizations alike demonstrably derived from all their past mistakes.
Mistakes-making as art
Mistakes are, therefore, to be encouraged because, as we just discussed, we learn through them.
Why then do we look at mistakes as something bad?
Society loves simplified boundaries: left or right, win or lose, good or bad, right or wrong. Traditional choices are typically rewarded by group thinking, and you are always a bit frowned upon if you deviate even slightly from the common route.
Making mistakes is an art. Make too big of a mistake and you are in trouble, possibly dead. Make no mistakes and you are stuck in your boring comfort zone: you learn nothing. It is a fine balance.
To learn new stuff, you need to experiment. We know that experiments lead to innovation and new knowledge, however what we also know about experiments is that lots of them don’t work.
Many moons ago, when I was about to complete my Computer Engineering degree, my professor told me: “We might do a lot of research around one topic and spend a lot of time going nowhere because we were using the wrong approach. That is fine: that’s an absolutely acceptable outcome of research”.
Naval explains this idea in a concise way:
No progress is possible without trial and error. Not in business, not in science, not in nature.
Without failure, there is no learning, no progress, and no success.
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Even in the highly efficient human brain, at each step, information is expanded with mistakes, potentially irrelevant content whose usefulness is, possibly, only revealed in subsequent steps.
Even in the human brain, whose efficiency we can safely assume to be very high, as information climbs the hierarchy from one region to the other, at each other step information is expanded with potentially irrelevant content whose usefulness is only revealed at the next step.
Therefore, let's desensitize the word mistake. It's not good. It's not bad. It is simply a fact of life.
Just like a pint of beer: it's good on a hot summer day when you are at the pub with your mates. It's probably not good at 7 o’clock in the morning when you just woke up and you're getting ready for an important meeting at work.
Mistakes in web3. Mistakes in business. Mistakes in life.
We all heard the Silicon Valley adage “Move fast and break things”.
That makes sense if you are a fast-paced start-up, thoughtfully (or maybe not) moving toward the edges of what's possible. In that environment, you are guaranteed to be making mistakes: that's great because you have no other way of uncovering what works and what doesn't. You are trying to get a sense of the boundaries.
In web3, it's even easier to make mistakes because we are all, quite literally, flying blind. The vast majority of crypto-ventures are at start-up stage. Building an industry from scratch isn't easy: we have very few reference points.
Opportunities for mistakes are abundant.
More in general, this is just how life works when you're growing by exploring the unknown. Usually, all things being equal, the more mistakes you experienced in the past, the more you learned from them, the better you are equipped to deal with the next curve ball that life will throw at you. Or the next Centralized Exchange that will light your money on fire. It's life.
At some point in the journey, though, making mistakes becomes more consequential. When you managed to build a scaled business, for example, a mistake can have massive externalities that are dangerous for you, your company, your industry and for many, many people. In crypto, new entrants at any point in time cyclically (every few months) learn this lesson.
However, even in large businesses, you must continue experimenting and, therefore, you must keep making mistakes. A culture of experimentation can ensure the business stays relevant: it is its antidote to competition.
How do you ensure you experiment safely (or as safely as possible)?
You’ve got to consider three things:
Make sure your experiments are off the critical path. Those initiatives should be relevant, but not yet too important for your core business;
Avoid failures that completely wipe you out - the “catastrophic outcome” that Nassim Taleb warns about;
Avoid failures at operational excellence (ie, the bit you’re good at because you know exactly how it works).
Other than the three caveats above, feel free to make plenty of mistakes and just ensure you learn from them as quickly as you can.
It is worth repeating:
Make mistakes, reflect on the outcome, acknowledge what went wrong, and then just f*cking move on.
Both you and your organization will gain a ton by doing this because when you fail, learn and come back up, you are practicing self-reliance and resourcefulness. You are building new confidence that will serve you well as you grow in life and your business touches new highs.
Conclusive Thoughts
Mistakes are a fact of life. It is how humans and organizations learn: progress comes from mistakes.
In fast-moving start-ups, mistakes are an everyday event.
In web3 businesses, they are inevitable as a new industry is getting formed and new boundaries are discovered.
Large organizations are less forgiving of mistakes, yet they must seek them as strategic experimentation ensures they stay relevant.
Making mistakes leads to learning, but this process it doesn’t happen by magic: it is important to acknowledge the mistakes we make, reflect on the lessons we learned and move on rapidly.
Towards the next one.
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