When success is important to you, you can take it badly if you get something wrong. To become truly proficient, though, we need to understand that mistakes are part of the process and to be expected.

We all make mistakes—indeed, it happens far more often than we realize. So why does it often take us by surprise when we find out that we’re wrong about something?

Error blindness

Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, has spent a lot of time pondering why our default assumption is that we are always right. She observes that from a young age we learn that people who get lots of things wrong didn’t study for the test, aren’t clever, and are troublemakers. They’re the people we try our best not to be.

Schulz also points out that while discovering we’re wrong feels bad, until we realize it, it feels exactly like being right. This is because when we’re wrong, we usually don’t know that we’re wrong. Sometimes we’re so focused on one thing that we miss something obvious (see “The selective attention test,”)—this is known as “error blindness.”

In order to succeed and be happy, it’s best if we shed the stereotype that only the “bad kid” ever makes mistakes. We all do: it’s just that we often don’t notice, or people are too polite to bring it to our attention. And it’s not the end of the world: as Schulz contends, it’s good to be reminded that we are imperfect —imperfection can even be a great source of creativity.

Success versus mastery

Would you say you are a perfectionist? Sometimes we have to accept work that “will do,” but which doesn’t meet our standards—and this can be nearly as discouraging as an outright mistake. But do we need to feel bad about the odd mediocre moment? In a popular TED Talk, art historian Sarah Lewis describes watching archers practice over and over again to master the “archer’s paradox” (see “The archer’s paradox,”), whereby to hit a target, you have to aim slightly askew. This, she argues, is the difference between success and mastery: it’s a success to hit the target, and mastery to be able to hit it more than once—but to reach that point, you have to miss many times.

Many great artists, Lewis adds, didn’t much care for some of their artworks that others value greatly: the “near win” that doesn’t please its maker is a part of learning. Being able to judge your work negatively should be taken as a sign of increasing mastery, as it means you are developing expertise.

Nobody likes to get things wrong, and nobody likes to feel they’re doing less than their best. But go easy on yourself: the most accomplished people in the world make mistakes, too.

The Archer’s Paradox

To hit the target, aim dead-on? Not necessarily. Archery gives us a good example of why early misses can be crucial. Arrows flex, and this means their trajectory curves in mid-air. Archers have to factor in the stiffness of the arrow’s shaft in order to judge how far its flight will deviate. This is the “archer’s paradox”: for a perfect shot, you have to aim slightly away from the bullseye.

Sometimes the only way to get a feel for things is to fire some arrows and see how they fly. Think of your mistakes as test shots: look at where your efforts land, and that can tell you how to correct your aim next time.

the selective attention test

In 1999, two psychologists at Harvard University, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, showed volunteers a short video. In the footage, two teams of three people are milling around a small space: one team is wearing white T-shirts, the other team is wearing black T-shirts, and each team has a basketball.

The volunteers were told to count how many passes of the ball the players wearing white made between themselves in a minute of play. During the game, someone dressed in a gorilla suit entered from stage right, walked through the players, paused in the middle of the frame beating their chest, then exited the scene stage left.

Half of the volunteers were so focused on their task that they didn’t notice the gorilla at all. This has become a classic example of selective attention: when we’re set on a challenge, it is all too easy to miss something obvious.