CHAPTER   11

The Value of Making Mistakes

T HE YEAR 1928 was a rough one. In the aftermath of World War I, Europe saw the rise of fascism and Nazism.¹ The world was on the brink of the Great Depression that occurred between the two world wars, and the United States was entering one of its most trying times as a nation. This was a time to get it right as mistakes would be catastrophic in one of the most perilous times in the history of the world.

Enter the most unlikely of heroes: Dr. Alexander Fleming.² Fleming was a scientist who was working on finding a cure for the common flu. Unsuccessful and frustrated after trying over and over to create a pill that would cure influenza, he left all of his lab equipment in place and went on vacation. There he made a life changing-mistake: He didn’t clean up his gear. He just left everything as it was and took off for the vacation.

This will go down in history as one of the most important mistakes of all time.

Days later, Fleming returned to a lab with equipment showing a peculiar mold. He then had a creative idea. He thought, What if I try to do something with this mold? What if I look at it under a microscope? This wasn’t standard thinking. He hadn’t learned to think like this in school. It was a risk. He was being creative. He was allowing mistakes to be made without knowing what the ultimate outcome would be because mistakes can be the catalyst for something unexpected, something unknown, something profoundly important.

What he saw under his microscope forever changed the course of history. He found that inside the petri dish was a mold that ate bacteria. The particular mold he discovered was penicillin,³ which eventually led to the discovery of antibiotics. Today he is remembered as one of the finest scientists who ever lived. He saved millions of lives all over the world because of antibiotics, but the route he found to this cure was anything but linear. It was creative, and most important, it was a mistake.

The physicist Joseph Henry once said:

The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well-prepared to receive them.⁴

Prepare your mind well for allowing mistakes in all you do; you might even save lives because of it. Thinking creatively often depends on making the most of your mistakes. Doing this has the potential to turn mistakes into what I call mistake utility: the understanding of how mistake become worthwhile.

UTILIZING YOUR MISTAKES

Mistake utility is a concept that allows you to see the value of mistakes. Those mistakes may turn out to be more than you have ever hoped for or even spark a new way of looking at things. But that is only possible if you look at mistakes as a form of wealth that is to be appreciated and valued, a utility that is to be treasured. Most people unfortunately follow the analytical view of mistakes, in which they are seen as things to be avoided at all costs.

The pessimistic and negative view that mistakes are to be shunned and never repeated for fear of getting it wrong is costly in any business or career. Actually, mistakes are really a breeding ground for innovation. This is one of the cornerstones of The Creator Mindset.

The world is filled with happy accidents and mistakes that allow for this product or that opportunity to be created from the ashes of an error. Your goal in business and in your career is to recognize mistakes as opportunities. It is critical not to go down the rabbit hole of a preordained view of the world that eliminates any creative opportunity for success.

The Creator Mindset allows for mistakes to be made because mistakes are the very foundation of creativity. When we lift away the fear of making a mistake, we give ourselves permission to explore, to push, to spread our wings and see what is out there, and to create. Analytical thinking focuses solely on a predetermined result in which only one thing should happen. Creative thinking focuses on the potential results in which many things can happen. With making mistakes comes the freedom of not having to get it right all the time, and in that freedom lies the spark of innovation.

What kind of creativity can you come up with if the fear of making a mistake is gone?

I’d like for you to think about this: What in your career or company has recently gone wrong and turned into some kind of mistake? Is it a transaction with a client in which you made some mistake on the paperwork? Is it a delivery that did not go as planned? A missed deadline? Not ordering in time for the big rush? No matter what the mistake was, it’s far more important to see what you can do with that mistake now that it’s over. There may be a quick rush to judgment or a search for someone to blame after a mistake is made, but what if you were to change your view on the mistake and look at it for a creative opportunity instead? What if you see its mistake utility? Go ahead and do it now. Look at the mistake that was made in a new way and see what creative spark you can derive from it.

If we take a moment to pause and look at the results with creativity in mind, we can see what the results are really telling us. Use the empathy, humor, and courage we talked about in Chapter 8 to create your own little victory and help uncover an unanticipated result in this mistake. The way we look at the results, no matter how unexpected or undesired they appear to be at first, is very powerful creatively because how we perceive the results, especially when they don’t go our way, is the playground of The Creator Mindset.

Remember, The Creator Mindset allows you to see things as they can be, not as they are. Seeing potential instead of mistakes can have a lasting and profound impact not only on your business but especially on your bottom line. Think of this tool as mistake utility in which a mistake becomes a currency you can trade.

MAXIMIZE YOUR MISTAKE UTILITY

Here are three things you can do right now to maximize the value of mistake utility in your career or company:

1. Stop.

2. Learn to love imperfection.

3. Rethink the outcome.

Stop

For one minute, stop your endless charge to reach goals and aspirations. Instead, really take stock of your surroundings and ask yourself what mistakes or errors have occurred lately and what they are telling you. Start looking for the valuable clues that led to what happened. Take pause: start really paying attention. I know it’s hard to look within instead of blaming someone or something else for your shortcomings, but doing this will allow you to let the error earn value by seeing it creatively.

Learn to Love Imperfection

In our race to get better and better at everything while producing faster and faster, it is essential to view things from the vantage point of potential. What I mean is that so much time is spent on tweaking an extra 0.01 percent of productivity out of an existing system or structure that we are not looking at the creative potential of what these imperfections tell us. The potential of creative genius is the imperfection of creative growth and creative power. Yet when we spend all our time looking to increase productivity in one specific realm, with blinders on, we lose sight of imperfections that can boost a new form of creativity.

Rethink the Outcome

Preconceived notions of what you think the results should be when you start a project run counter to the tenets of The Creator Mindset. Move forward with a project but let the outcome speak for itself. You might be surprised by what it tells you (as long as you’re willing to really listen).

Let go of what the outcome should or could be and instead accept that the outcome just might be a mistake. That’s okay. How many times have we focused only on the result and not been creative enough to see the potential of the result? We are so keen to control our destiny that we try to control the result at all costs. It’s like shooting ourselves in the foot. What we are missing is the opportunity for creativity to take hold and present a result that is something other than the preordained vision we think we need. Mistakes have the potential to lead to an even better outcome if you can learn to think about them in a creative way.

SURE, NOT ALL MISTAKES can have the same impact on the world as that of antibiotics, but mistakes of all sizes should become an important and celebrated success. Take the invention of the Post-it, for example: it too was a mistake (and one I’m personally grateful for because I can’t tell you how much I love Post-its).

In 1971, engineers at 3M were trying to invent a superstrong glue. Instead, they came up with a superweak glue that became the foundation of the Post-it franchise—a franchise born out of a mistake.⁵

Safety glass was invented by mistake as well. In the early 1900s, the French chemist Edouard Bènèdictus accidentally dropped a glass flask that was coated with a plastic called cellulose nitrate, and surprisingly it didn’t shatter.⁶ Now just about every kind of glass has this plastic on it to help prevent shattering. Think of how many lives this mistake saved by protecting occupants in cars from shattered glass.

In the late 1930s, a woman named Ruth Wakefield ran out of an ingredient while making cookies and substituted a bar of chopped-up chocolate instead. She invented the Toll House cookie (then called the Toll House Chocolate Crunch cookie) entirely by mistake.⁷

These are just a few stories of mistakes turning into utility. I could have filled many volumes with other examples. The point in all these examples is that folks who were pursuing some goal and trying to make the smallest number of mistakes possible could have given up and quit when things did not go their way. Most of them would have, including me. I know you may be thinking, Those guys got lucky. My company makes mistakes all the time, but we lose money. I get that, and the truth is that not all mistakes can be lucrative all the time. Some business mistakes can be devastating, as we will see later in Chapter 20. But rebound not only is possible, it can far outweigh the downside if you are open to looking at things with The Creator Mindset.