Making Mistakes Early to Prevent Future Mishaps

By Lili Gevorkian on January 20, 2014

It sounds counter-intuitive to make mistakes as a way to prevent them in the future. What about making no mistakes and saving ourselves the trouble?

If we consider that there’s tremendous guilt associated with failure and a sizable chunk of people would prefer to move through their life in near perfect measures and broadcast it as is, then we really ought to stop and wonder how and when we’ll ever develop the tools we need to overcome difficult situations.

What happens if you don’t learn from your mistakes? Or the mistakes of others?

When we don’t have the experience of accepting our failure and then learning how to get back up again, we become discouraged. This is prevalent in schooling, particularly in cases where students have grown in an environment that frowns upon errors. Generation Y is bearing the brunt of this; students are focused on reaching point B with as little error and excess work required. The pressure to master courses all while having to juggle work, family, and social lives is creating a culture of pseudo-success. We have the answers memorized, momentarily, and then discarded. We don’t have the experience we need to make smart decisions during strenuous circumstances that will inevitably come. Our toolbox is lacking a key trait: productive effort.

There’s an idea that if students don’t learn it correctly the first time, any errors made may slow down the consolidation of learning. According to research that appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, the opposite was found. Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays and Robert Bjork at UCLA found that students who were provided circumstances that made errors more likely earlier on were able to learn better.

People remember things better and can critically think through future problems if they are given challenging tests on the material. It was shown in those series of experiments that if students were unable to recall information needed to answer a question, they remembered the information better later than in a control experiment where they were only required to study the information.  Making mistakes earlier on and then learning from those allows better performance later; it’s useful as a means of studying efficiently or learning any new material.

We [college students] are still young and growing and have years to refine our habits. We’re allowed, almost expected, to dabble in poor choices until we know better. And when do we know better? After making the same mistake often enough to internalize the lesson that’s embedded there. The quicker those mistakes are made, the earlier we’ll be able to embrace it and move onto the next.

Some moments will feel blissful and others, inevitably, dreadful but all will teach us something. If we can prevent it and understand how to act in an unfavorable scenario, that’s fantastic. By no means should we justify poor future choices as learning experiences and then go about committing them. However, we should remain aware when they do occur and formulate more informed decisions in the future.

Everything that we’re doing now as students serves on smaller scale in the grand scheme: maybe we don’t meet a deadline or mess up an assignment but the effects are of a smaller magnitude. Later on our mishaps may affect more people as the resulting error ripples through (a company, families, patients, etc). There’s a disparity among the two situations.

Take your risks now. Perhaps somewhat calculated, and yet not allowing the fear of the unknown or the nervousness to keep us in stagnation. Failure should not remain a deterrent for new opportunities. If dealt with properly, we will be wiser next time around and another step closer to success.

Remember, everyone struggles somewhere. Life’s challenges serve to test our ability to grow and adapt and move through them. Experience aids in guidance. We must learn from ourselves and others and remain resilient through the tides.

 

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