After recognizing that the soundest way of understanding the processes of making mistakes, in hopes of reducing their frequency and magnitude, is to look at our own mistakes, we ask “how should this be done?”
This investigation, if done with patience, honesty, compassion and logic, might lead to valuable self knowledge. By this, we might come to better understand some of our tendencies and habits that we had not known. This, is a crucial step in living a good life; one filled with value and meaning, rather than shallow reactions to impulses and events.
We can either take a single mistake or maybe look for trends in many mistakes. If one has experience with this process, maybe looking at many would be effective, but if this is new, it might be best to start with a single mistake. Without prior experience, we can better manage a controlled and limited process, rather than something that might seem and feel larger and complex at first. And so for the purposes of discovering methods that could be used for as many people and for as many mistakes as possible, here, we shall look at trends of mistakes.
We might sit and think only, or we might have a paper and pen, to take note. As the goal is to organize a complex set of causes from a multitude of sources and to recognize trends with differing frequencies and magnitudes, we should chose to continue however one can be most efficient. For us, here, we shall write.
Looking back, to recent past, might be the best timeline to examine. After all, the future isn’t here and the our early history might be subject to lack of information, mistakes in remembering, narrative building biases of the brain and sometimes even be too heavy a subject to analyze without having practiced the values we started with here; patience, compassion, logic, etc.
We can now look back at recent past mistakes and organize them in a way that helps us differentiate between them. We might order them by how painful or costly they were, or by the similarity of their situations or in any other way that makes sense to us. As this process is ultimately a personal one, it’s important to remain flexible and adapt to what feels intuitively correct to us. If we make a mistake in this process, we can always try again in another way. For this article, we will group mistakes by their kind: mistakes with others and mistakes with ourselves.
When looking at mistakes made with others, we might notice patterns and trends by asking ourselves “when have these mistakes often happened?”, “Where have they often happened?”, “Did they happen because I lost mys temper or because the other person did?”, and “what exactly was bothering me deep down, in that situation?”.
From the answers of such questions, we might recognize information that ultimately provides an image of us, in relation to the world. Here we can see our chosen mental limits and the habits we have to get emotional, to misunderstand or to not even listen to anyone else. The answers will vary, from person to person, but the crucial step here is to acknowledge the defects in our process. We must be like an engineer who has looked at many test runs and will step-by-step try to manage and fix the small issues with each part of the machine. The engineer understands that the machine is valuable, that the mistakes don’t mean the machine is useless. They also understand that all these mistakes have given them a map of exactly what to fix to improve the machine.
Now, we aren’t machines and some of use aren’t engineers, but the engineer mindset, or more broadly the scientific mindset, will help us understand what we are doing here. We have value and our mistakes do not imply anything about us as people. Our mistakes simply show us actions we shouldn’t have done or errors in judgement we committed. Too often, people take things personally, and this costs them any improvement, any betterment of their quality of life. The opportunity to better only comes once we accept that we haven’t done the best actions. This also relates to accepting and reacting to critical and honest feedback. There is valuable information everywhere, all the time, we simply need to open our eyes to see it all.
Once we have a set of answers, practicality is key. We must ask, at every turn “what can I do about this?” And the emphasis is with the “I” and with the “can”. Because here we accept that we must focus only on the elements under our control. Does it help, in any way, to focus on what we can do nothing at all about? No! It might even take away attention from the things we can do! Focus on things out of our reach also lead to negatives and unnecessary emotions. Worried about what may happen? No, whatever comes, we will try to be as prepared as we can and when it comes, we shall deal with it to the best of our abilities.
Once we know what we can do to prevent or make it less likely for the same mistakes to happen, we need to create a simple system. A system made from a set of practices (i.e. habits we will do on the regular), counter measures for when things don’t go as planned and we want to keep control the damage, and an understanding that mistakes will continue happen forever, as no one is perfect, and we can simply do our best to reduce their frequency and magnitudes.
Orange Stoic 