I Am Looking Forward to My Next Mistake

My dad was a do-it-yourselfer of the highest quality. Plumbing, electrical, carpentry, automotive…he could do it all. And most importantly, he did it right. When I was a young lad I asked him, “how do you know how to do all that stuff?”

My father, a taciturn man, simply replied, “experience.”

“How did you get experience?”

“I made a lot of mistakes.”

 Or as Oscar Wilde once said, “experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”

In life or business we naturally try to avoid mistakes. And when we make a faux pas most of us react in one of three ways; beat ourselves up and dwell on it ad nauseam OR downplay it in our minds as being of no importance OR, and this is my personal favorite, blame someone else. Although very human, what a crazy species we are, none of these reactions help us to avoid making mistakes of the same ilk in the future.

 My father used a different approach. When he “messed up” (not his exact words but this is a G-rated article) he would, after he calmed down, “take a gander at what he did” (today we call this an analysis) and try to “figure out where the train came off the tracks”. Did he have a good idea of what he was getting into before he started? Was what he was trying to do practical? Did he have the skills to do the task? Did he have a good plan? Did he have the right tools? Did he have adequate resources? What could he have done differently? Was it worth it to try again?

 The similarities to running a business should be obvious. Businesses fail for a lot of reasons but not profiting from mistakes ranks in the top 3. Notice I said “profit” from mistakes and not merely “learn” from them? There is a tremendous amount of information to be gleaned from failure but learning what went wrong is of little value unless you understand how to make it right – and profitable.

 An ongoing, objective look at performance, whether in sales, operations or customer service is absolutely essential for the growth of a business and also its very survival. I’m always fascinated when a company focuses its energy on changing the end results of a problem instead of correcting and learning from the mistakes that caused it in the first place.  If a weed is growing in your garden do you build a fence around it to hide it or do you snip the top off and hope it doesn’t grow back? A good gardener would dig down to the roots and eliminate that particular problem. A GREAT gardener would take steps to understand how that weed got there in the first place and do what was necessary to prevent it from ever growing there again.

 Always remember that “big” mistakes seldom happen. More often they are a series of “little” mistakes that add up to negative results with “big” consequences.