Hacker News Reader

Comment by ks | Hacker News Reader

This quote should be printed out and put on the wall:

"They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities."

I think this is one of the reasons why start-ups and small companies are often more flexible than larger companies. In a small group you know that even if a person makes a mistake, that person can be great.

When you add more layers of people between an employee and the person who controls your career and salary, the employee is more likely to be measured using statistics. A failure will stand out and could impact the salary.

View on HN

Mistakes are essential for learning, growth, and becoming great.

Corollary: While great people don't make the easy mistakes any longer, they'll focus on making great mistakes because that's where they're learning at.

Mistakes might be great for learning, but that does not mean that they should be praised, or that there should not be disincentives for making mistakes.

Mistakes have consequences, great mistakes have great consequences. I do not therefore think that great people make great mistakes. Otherwise, we probably would not know of their existence.

They should be praised. Fear mistakes, fear disincentives, avoid any consequences, and you fear life!

By definition of what a mistake is, you certainly don't want to make mistakes as soon as you've learned how to do (what you want to do) without making them. By merely making mistakes, any mistakes, you won't grow.

But you know that you're growing in life when you gain new problems to replace the old problems. And when you're working on something new, you'll always be making mistakes. New mistakes. It's those you don't want to fear, disincentivize, or avoid.

If you don't make mistakes, you're either too shy to not challenge yourself on anything you might not know well enough already, or you're the perfection itself and you know everything already.

Depending on the context not challenging yourself or being too shy might be a mistake in itself.

I do think many of us do not like mistakes, do not purposely aim for them, do try not to make mistakes, etcetera, but we still do make mistakes. Just because we dislike something does not mean that something does not occur.

I agree with you, we grow by making mistakes, where I disagree is that children should be free to do whatever they wish, yeah shoot that man, yeh boy go in front of the car, yes child do not do your homework, yes give the wrong answer to 2+2.

So I think my point is that mistakes are not a great thing, are not something to be romanticised, idolised, whatever. They have a use of course, but the consequences of mistakes can be painful.

Also, we have been taught all our life to be conformist, yet many of us do not always conform, we have been taught all our life to not make mistakes, yet many of us do not live in absolute fear of making mistakes, are not completely stagnant and do nothing but lay in our bed all day for otherwise we might make a mistake.

I'm not sure if those mistakes compare. When you fail at school's test it's because you didn't learn some facts or formulas, not because you took wrong steps in unpredictable markets and environments.

The companies do punish people who make the wrong decisions even though these people couldn't have known they would be wrong and just took a bold step. But in startups you also get penalized by losing your company and/or money.

Mistakes are part of life. Failing because you didn't learn a fact only shows that you didn't learn that fact. It shows nothing else. But children grow up and become managers thinking that mistakes is something to be avoided when in fact mistakes are something to be expected and accepted.

This fear of mistakes is exactly the reason some people actually believe in projections. Sad but true.

And yet, this is phrased to suggest we've made a mistake, and we should be fearful of its consequences. I guess he's speaking to educated people :).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com