Good People Make Mistakes

A preface: When I write “mistake,” I don’t mean “failure.” Not in this case, anyway.

I’d distinguish the two by segmenting “failure” as something people do that does not succeed by their definitions of success for that thing. A project, say. You make an effort, you have a certain goal or outcome in mind, and you don’t achieve it. A “mistake,” on the other hand, is something you did or said that caused a misunderstanding or hurt someone or broke something or caused a problem.

While no one wants to fail—even if we all acknowledge the good in failure—humans rarely assume that someone who has taken on a project and failed at it is a bad person.

However, if someone makes a mistake, that person often feels like a bad person—and the people who witness the mistake quite often think the same.

Though bad people do make mistakes, good people make them, too.

We need to remember this.

In fact, I’d venture that the best people are the people who make mistakes. People who have made mistakes have an experience that—if they heed it—will help them learn and grow as humans.

And here lies the crux of my thinking in this post: What makes you a better person is making mistakes. We should welcome making mistakes.

What makes you a bad person, in counterpoint, is making a mistake, not correcting the fault either in word or deed, and not learning from it and changing your future behavior.

When we do nothing that could turn out to be a mistake—when we are too cautious and too “safe” in our actions and dialogues—we stunt ourselves.

When we see someone else make a mistake and dismiss them as a “bad person,” we stunt them, in turn.

First, because we’ve just taught them that they shouldn’t make mistakes and, second, because when we approach a mistake as a deep character flaw, we’ve missed the chance to approach someone with compassion and to help them understand the error and learn from it.

What do I mean by a compassionate and helpful approach?

Research shows that when you make it okay to make a mistake—called “mistake tolerance” in psychological literature—and you take the time to talk about what happened, why it’s a mistake (if the person hasn’t already seen that it was one), and how to avoid the same error in the future, people do change. When you shame people for their mistakes, however, research shows that they do not learn and, more importantly, they do not change.

Have I made mistakes in my life?

I don’t know any creature—human or otherwise—who could respond in the negative, quite frankly.

Of course I’ve made mistakes. Over and over again. I’m stubbornly awkward in so many ways.

And I’ve made mistakes that garnered the wrong and the right responses, at least when it came to my learning and growing.

Most memorably recently, this happened in a few of my French language classes with extremely strict and unforgiving teachers. Their responses to my errors made me feel deeply ashamed, which shut me down immediately and made me so fearful of further error that I struggled many times to participate in class, in my francophone world, and to even continue with my language learning.

Fortunately, classroom shaming might have relatively anodyne outcomes for an adult with most of her formal education behind her.

More often in recent years, in my grown-up world, the mistakes I’ve made have come from using the wrong word or term—unknowingly—in having a mistaken understanding of something or impression about something, and in speaking or acting in a way that someone else took badly, regardless of my intention.

I’m sure I’ve made these mistakes and people around me have said nothing, either deciding I’m a bad person or, at best, an ignorant person and then, I’d imagine, deciding that they’d rather limit our interaction. However, the times when someone has spoken to me about the misstep, either privately or in the moment, and when they’ve approached it from a place of openness and kindness and understanding—from a place of assuming that I didn’t have bad intentions and am not a bad person but that I simply didn’t know better—I’m neverendingly appreciative. (And I often like them even better than I already did, as their approach shows such generosity of spirit!)

Likely everyone reading along with this musing can think of examples of both reactions to their personal mistakes—and likely can think of times when someone else around them made a mistake, too, whether we spoke to the person about it or let it pass.

Though we can’t control others’ reactions to our errors, we can control our own reactions to others’ errors. Maybe we don’t have the bandwidth to speak to someone every time we witness a mistake, but assuming the best of the person and giving compassionate discussion a try could only make this world a better place when we do.

Kindness and compassion won’t solve even a fraction of the world’s problems, but I do believe they can solve a few.