Not Until You've Made 1000 Mistakes

I've often heard it said (most recently by Ira Glass) that you need to be bad at something for a long time before you can be good at it. Another version is that you need to make a lot of mistakes before you can be good at something. Yet another version is that you have make all of the mistakes before you can start getting something right.

With this in mind I'm proposing a new approach to coaching and training. Each trainee has to keep a book in which s/he lists mistakes as they are made. Rather than the usual approach of withholding a license or certificate until a certain number of hours are logged or tests passed, under the new system, you don't get your union card until you have made and logged a certain number of mistakes.

There's a danger, of course, that the method could generate folks who are simply really good at being bad. But more likely, I think, would be a transformation in which we'd be able to own our "mistakes" rather than trying to separate them from our biography (not the real me, not the me of now, not the me I'm trying to be). Rather than ripping the sheet of paper from the typewriter and balling it up in an attempt to symbolically annihilate our failed effort, denying that it ever existed, we could just roll it out of the machine and add it to our "nope" pile. If done without a wise-ass sense of irony (the way people collect rejection letters to soothe their dejection during the job search), it could get you back to a genuine appreciation of the actual process of creation and learning: lots of experiments fail, lots of trials are errors. My guess, as a teacher (and as an observer of myself), is that the terror of having mistakes, failures, and subpar performances attach to the existential self is a huge psycho-emotional current against which we swim most of the time.

The alternative title for this post would be something like "Hiding Failure as Bad Faith," using the term as Sartre did in Being and Nothingness -- denial of the facticity of one's biography or of the possibility of transcending it in future. Something peculiar and not entirely helpful is going on when our insistence on seeing achievement and expertise as indicative of inner worth that was always there makes us want to hide the process of achieving or shames those who are in the process of learning. It's very hard to harness the full power of the self if, at the same time, you have to put energy into denying that it's actually you who is struggling with a new skill.

So get out your notebook and start logging your mistakes.