Don’t avoid making mistakes

Mistakes are a major part of learning, and we don’t make nearly enough mistakes, why many of us never really learn more. Don’t follow the straight line, don’t take the safe path, don’t simplify in order to stay within budget or restrictions.

The moment you hold back in order to avoid mistakes, you limit innovation, originality, concept, evolvement, and even worse, you prevent yourself from learning and gaining new experience.

The interesting part of this is, if you follow the same path every time, you will also continue to make the same mistakes every time. What may seem like a “side-effect” of “the right way of doing things” could probably be avoided completely, by taking the right initiative and doing it different.

Nothing new will happen, if you do the same things as last time – though some of us do indeed thrive in the process of knowing how things are going. And this is where we get the “Specialists”. Specialists in making one particular thing the same way every time, following the same process every time. Have you ever hired a consultant demanding certain versions of software, having certain requirements to products or resources? And should they fail in the process, they will blame the conditions they are working in?

This is one of the reasons I see myself more like a Professional Noob. I attempt to learn something new, challenge myself every single day, making mistakes regularly in order to evolve, but what you also will realise, is that your general knowledge and understanding of how certain things work, will also improve, and in the end, despite whatever framework, language, workstation, environment etc. you are working with, you will be able to find a solution more easily, cause your experience span across much more than a narrow expert level.

So don’t avoid making mistakes.. The more you do, the more you will learn, the better you will become.