Learning From Your Mistakes

‘I made a blunder, my dear Watson – which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through
your memoirs.’
‘SILVER BLAZE’
Everybody makes mistakes. Even the Great Detective. But he knew that to make a mistake is forgivable so long as you make it only once.



Consider his comments on the subject in ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax’:
‘Should you care to add the case to your annals, my dear Watson,’ said Holmes that evening, ‘it can only be as an example of that temporary
eclipse to which even the best-balanced mind may be exposed. Such slips are common to all mortals, and the greatest is he who can
recognise and repair them. To this modified credit I may, perhaps, make some claim.’
Today, making a mistake is considered an integral factor in progressing and developing. In 2007, Robert Sutton, a professor of management
science and engineering at Stanford University, wrote a blog for the Harvard Business Review:
One of the mottoes that Diego Rodriguez and I use at the Stanford d.school (Institute of Design) is ‘failure sucks, but instructs’. We encourage
students to learn from the constant stream of small setbacks and successes that are produced by doing things (rather than just talking about
what to do). To paraphrase our d.school founder and inspiration David Kelley: ‘If you keep making the same mistakes again and again, you
aren’t learning anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.’