Mea Culpa

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: Better by Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong

Competency: self-development, decision-making, judgment

Who benefits: potentially all of us

Consultant Usage: good background material for coaches and executive coaches

What’s it about? Astute, intelligent readers will note that only four posts ago I wrote “Failure Is An Option.”  I must be seeking some sort of inner peace as I review more literature on mistakes.

Today it is the just released book, Better By Mistake by Alina Tugend, a New York Times columnist.  She, herself, is driven by past mistakes, mostly minor, that affected her effectiveness.  She dwells on them.  She will beat herself up over them.  And now she wants to understand them. 

This is the point where I recommend the book, or not.  For me this is a book of self-discovery.  I make the proverbial “mountain out of molehills” when I catch myself in a mistake (or worse when someone else catches my errors).  I beat myself up.  I won’t let go.  My body physically reacts to remembrances of mistakes past … even decades past.  Others make mistakes, I make blunders.  A missed apostrophe is a catastrophe!   If this begins to describe you too, then you can benefit from this book.

The book jacket does an excellent job of summarizing the book: The author “reveals how cultural attitudes about mistakes can affect us from the earliest stages of our lives and shape us into adults who steer clear of risks and challenges.”

Here is another quote in the book that I like: “Most Americans know they are supposed to say, ‘we learn from our mistakes,’ but deep down, they don’t believe it for a minute.”  Yup!  That’s me! 

There is a story I find quite amusing.  She berates her boss in an email and then accidently sends it to him instead of the intended reader.  Later she reviews what she did and what she can learn from the mistake.  It is what she learned that brought the smile.  She learned to not fill in the “To” line until she is ready to send the email.  Well, that is helpful, I suppose.

There just might be, maybe, other possible learning’s from that mistake.

There is a companion story that made me smile: …(A) woman driving her son home from kindergarten asked what he had learned.   “Nothing,” he said.  “Nothing?” she asked.  “You didn’t learn a single thing?”  “No,” he replied.  “My teacher said you learn by making mistakes, and I didn’t make any today.”

Hmmm.  Not likely to hear that conversation at work.

If you are still trying to decide whether the book is for you, here are some of my favorite chapter titles:
 
Lessons from the Cockpit
Blaming You, Blaming Me
You Say Mistake, I Say Lesson

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book – a nice blend of information with the occasional story – and feel a bit stronger as a result. 

So if you catch a misteak in this post, don’t bother sending me a corlection!

Catch you later. 

[tags]mistakes, making mistakes, failure, alina tugend, envisia, envisia learning, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.