Mistakes & Learning
I’ve been working through Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide
As it turns out, making mistakes – and analyzing them – is a key to any kind of learning. Whether playing backgammon, shooting billiards, throwing a football, learning calculus, starting a new company, preaching a sermon, or leading an organization – making lots of mistakes is essential to developing competence. Lehrer quotes Niels Bohr, a contemporary and colleague of Einstein, commenting that an expert is “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field” (51).
I’d just about guarantee that we’ve each experienced learning from our mistakes first hand. For instance, I’ve said many times – mostly joking – that rather than take a salary I probably should have paid my first congregation for all that I learned through the mistakes I made with them. In spite of how much we learn from our mistakes, however, two things regularly stand in the way of freeing us to embrace them as valuable and encourage others to do the same.
1) Fear of failure. We live in a society and culture that quickly equates mistakes not with developing competence but with incompetence. This starts, I think, in our schools, with an emphasis on grades assigned not by what we’ve learned but our performance on tests (and, no, they are not the same thing!). Test-based education creates an atmosphere of risk avoidance because we fear making mistakes.
2) The actual cost of mistakes. There is some reason for our fear of failure, and that is that mistakes can cost, sometimes dearly, in terms of time, energy, and investment. So we tend to play it safe, rarely risking anything new or learning from our mistakes not just from fear of seeming incompetent but for fear of squandering resources.
But here’s the thing: invention demands failure. We’ve all heard stories about how many times Thomas Edison failed in trying to create the light bulb before succeeding, but I’m not sure we’ve taken it to heart. No invention comes without lots of failure. That’s as true of trying out a new preaching method or teaching strategy as it is inventing a light bulb or airplane. So how can we find a way to celebrate failure and in this way cultivate a spirit of innovation that may help us solve some of the significant challenges we face today? I’d suggest three things.
1) Emphasize – in the classroom, church, home, work, etc. – hugging what we don’t know instead of clinging to what we do. I’ve written before about the importance of not just admitting but claiming what we don’t know because it’s there that we learn the most. Indeed, I’d suggest that we need to rethink recognizing what we don’t know as one of the surest signs of intelligence there is. That means that we need to find a way to reward questions and failed experiments as much as we do perfect test scores.
2) Remember that the point isn’t just making mistakes, but learning from them. One of the teachers both of our kids have enjoyed tells her kids, “Make a mistake everyday; but make it a different one!” We can cultivate an atmosphere where mistakes and failures are celebrated by taking time to learn from them and in this way showing how valuable they are.
3) Make “little bets” before you make big ones. As Peter Sims points out in his book Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries
If we want to learn, we need to be prepared to fail. So let the mistakes begin!
As usual, you have stimulated my imagination, David. I am thinking about asking what we do not know in the context of what we would like to know. Starting a new summer Bible study next for my congregation. I think I will try that approach. This could be interesting – and fun!
Carol Reed — are you from the Minneapolis area? I had a friend growing up named Carol Reed….
David, as always, you challenge my risk-averse nature. still trying not to fear failure so much. thank you.
I’ve just recently received his book and cannot wait to dive into his next one lying in wait, Imagine. Colbert first tuned me into Lehrer and the understanding of how emotions tie so deeply into our decision process as to be almost unknown is fascinating and gives deep connections to God in our life- if our emotions are tied so intimately into our daily decisions, how might God be at work in the hidden-ness of our own hearts, thoughts, and ideas? To me, this is a great work at uncovering some of the ways in which we can discern God at work in our lives. I found this book, and this blog article, very faithfully-minded, if not in a new and fresh way.
Interesting stuff. I worked for years at a YMCA Camp (Ihduhapi) in the Adventure Learning Center – mainly working with small groups in experiential learning and team/trust building. One of the fundamental aspects to adventure learning was the aspects that mistakes were not bad, but essential – as long as they are learned from. As a way to demonstrate this to the group and have a little fun in the process we would occasionally play “Simon Says.” However, when someone would make a mistake, instead of sitting out for the rest of the game, you would simply raise your hand, shout, “OPPS!” (admitting your mistake), then run to a different spot in the circle so you could look at your mistake from a different perspective. Really simple. Really fun.
Applied to life, being able to view mistakes as things that don’t remove us from the game, but instead allow us to continue, but from a new place moves us away from fear of failure and helps us view our mistakes, not as character flaws or things that exclude us from participation, but rather as places of potential growth and learning – for the group and for the individual.
Understanding this, and trying to live this out is a daily process (similar and very related to daily dying and rising in Christ). But one that is also freeing and transformational.