Making mistakes is useful

Published in El Pais, 15 September 2018.

Since we are Little kids our parents look after us to make sure we do not get in too much trouble. Don’t do that, don’t touch this, be back in time, don’t put that into your mouth, don’t run on the stairs etc. I can imagine all of us remember the things our parents told not to do, which in many cases we did anyway to find out that running down the stairs on your socks can indeed lead to a near dead experience.

But now try to remember what things you learned the most from? It was probably those mistakes you really got yourself into, maybe ignoring the advice of your parents, but also you managed to solve yourself. No textbook or teacher can replace a real-life experience.

However, in general we are afraid to make mistakes and the best thing to make sure you do not make mistakes is in the first place to not try anything new, simply because when trying something new it might go wrong. But actually, the fact that something goes wrong is probably not the worst. The worst is that our boss, our colleagues, our family or friends get hold on our mistake or failure and we worry too much on what they might think of it.

Once a person said “do not worry what others think of you because they probably worry more about what you think of them”. With that in mind, let it go, try new things, make mistakes… For sure at one moment you will not fail and you will reach success and everybody will have forgotten the mistakes you made before and they are probably wondering how you managed your success. Well the recipe is simple “try and error”, a widely accepted model of success. Still you will have to embrace and celebrate all the mistakes you made to improve and become better. Actually, you almost need to have masochistic characteristics and enjoy the fact that whatever you are doing can going wrong.

People always say that for starting a business you need to take risks. This is completely true, but the bottom line is that you need be prepared to make mistakes and learn from them on your way to success. So, making mistakes has its purpose!