This is my little lifeline to the world. Believe me, I am qualified to throw this lifeline. It’s not just OK to make mistakes, it’s required.
The people we believe are the greatest, at whatever they’re the greatest at, didn’t get there without f’ing some stuff up on the way. In fact, if you were having dinner with them, they wouldn’t wax on about their successes. They would talk about their failures, near failures and how they got through them.
Not one person ever came out of the womb and was good at something. I bet even Jesus (if you believe) got his good toga dirty when he wasn’t supposed to.
Everyone has to work to get where they are and their mistakes are how they learn to get better. So why do some people work so hard to cover up mistakes?
I was working with someone once and they had made a mistake and they rearranged the truth to cover it up. We were working on a project I had proposed. I sensed he was bad mouthing the project. This is known as hedging. If anything goes wrong there would be an “I told you so” to follow.
The deployment of the project should have gone smoothly. However, a key piece to the project was setting up an account. This person was the one that originally setup the account. On the day of deployment it became clear that we are working with the wrong type of account and the deployment needed to be shelved.
He then started telling the client that the reason we could not finish was because of the company who provided the account screwed up and we were waiting on them to finish the account setup. If karma is worth anything this guy has a tiny penis and huge hands.
Mark Twain is one of my favorite people to quote. He says: “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
When you screw up, do the right thing… own it and learn from it.
