Ever made a huge mistake in your life? I’m not talking about those regular day to day examples, where we forget to look in our agenda in the morning, or we skip taking bread out of the freezer. I’m also not talking about the major f-ups like leaving our passport on a hotel desk, or spilling coffee on your laptop, where your only copy of the next great European novel was saved. I mean the big ones: life changing mistakes. Mistakes that moves you in a direction that was entirely unintentional and certainly not on your list of desired life events. You said the wrong thing at the wrong time or stepped out of the car at the wrong moment and now your life has fundamentally changed for the worse.
And it’s your own dumb fault right? You ignored the “don’t feed the crocodiles” signpost on the way down to the river, or you didn’t listen to a friend when she said, “Hey you’ve had way too much to drink, do you want me to call you a taxi”? You thought the Rottweiler looked cute and friendly, or you had a deadline, and damn all those pesky health and safety regulations for oil rigs during a tropical cyclone!
Fortunately, these kinds of mistakes are few and far between, because our brains have a wonderful inner critic who steps in and throws up red flags at just the right moment.
In these kinds of scenarios our inner critic is one of the most useful neurological tools we possess and one that makes sure we survive in this densely connected modern world. It allows us to think ahead, think backwards and think sideways. It’s an amazing ability and it helps us avoid these massive mistakes on a daily basis, whether consciously or not, our inner critic keeps us safe.
The only catch is that sometimes "safe" isn’t a positive thing and sometimes our inner critic is switched on regardless of crocodiles or riding into oncoming traffic. So let’s look on the bright side of life and sing the praises of mistakes.
Mistakes are a motor for:
- Creativity
- Improvisation
- Problem Solving
- Adaption
- Correction
All features of what we commonly call “intelligence”. You can probably see where I’m going from here, mistakes and intelligence are inseparable from each other and my nightmare scenario is a world where we stop making them.
I’ve studied jazz for a long time, for a short time as a student, then as a professional musician and for a much longer span of time as a hobby. Jazz is an art form built on and for mistakes, as my late great Uncle: jazz saxophonist Sean Bergin would say “Mistakes are the best bits”.
He is talking about a crucial concept: Giving a mistake meaning.
When you play jazz you have a grid of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic connections and within those boundaries you are pretty much free to do what you want. The music gets interesting though when you step outside of that grid for a moment and play a note or hit a beat that is unexpected, surprising and completely out of place. No one in the band or audience heard it coming and it wakes everyone up, you must resolve it or integrate it into the grid again otherwise it’s just a mess, but if you can do that then that one unexpected note turns into the musical highlight of the evening and takes everything and one to the next level.
We are at a wonderful inflection point with intelligent technology, its still making mistakes, it needs our validation and corrections. It isn’t anywhere near being at the point where we can just bark orders into a microphone and 30 seconds later we have exactly what we requested, without a single grammatical or tonal error.
This is a good thing. The technology is intelligent when we can't completely trust its output and it requires interaction, intervention or correction to have meaning. Just imagine for a moment that you had a conversation with a god like AI model and you knew that everything it was saying was correct, everything had been sourced, and it had answered your question at the upper limits or beyond of human intelligence. I’m of the opinion that it would lose all meaning, which in turn would mean we don’t remember it, don’t reframe it to our personal situation and just “smooth brain” that information into one ear and out the other.
During or after my AI workshops or congresses people ask me if having AI in education is a good thing. I’m a techno-optimist and a realist, so “yes” absolutely. But once AI hits a point where it goes beyond our abilities, then we have a very real problem.
So let’s delve into this topic and see what experts say about this idea that mistakes are the best bits (yes I used the word “delve” just to piss people off on Linkedin, bill me)
- Turning off the inner critic boosts creative flow: Neuroscientific studies of expert improvisers indicate that unleashing creativity may require silencing our self-critical impulses. For example, brain scans of jazz musicians show that during improvisation, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – the brain region responsible for monitoring mistakes and self-censorship – actually deactivates. Researchers observed a suppression of this judgment center, which implies that letting go of conscious self-monitoring (i.e. not worrying about messing up) is what allows unfettered, in-the-moment creativity to flourish:
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- A 2018 neuroscience study showed that mistakes set off an almost instantaneous chain reaction in the brain: even before one realizes an error, “error neurons” fire, followed ~50 milliseconds later by a burst of “conflict neurons” – a cascade of activity that helps the brain reconcile discrepancies and encode new information more deeply. Mistakes are the spark of adaptive brain activity. In other words: The human brain treats errors as fundamental data for learning
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- Fail early, learn faster: Educational research suggests that early and frequent failures can actually speed up improvement. One study found that the sooner and more often students failed at a task, “the sooner they [could] move forward and improve.” Demystifying failure in this way makes goals more attainable. “We should really be thinking of failure as part of a process of iterating toward success”.
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- Innovation demands a tolerance for failure: In the corporate world, truly innovative cultures embrace mistakes as learning opportunities. Such workplaces are often defined by a “tolerance for failure” and a willingness to experiment – and research confirms that these attitudes translate into stronger innovative performance
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- Employees who feel safe to take risks and fail (without repercussions) are more likely to devise creative solutions and breakthroughs. In demanding professional environments, the ability to learn from failure is crucial. For example, scientists know experiments rarely work on the first try, so perseverance is key. As one researcher quipped after bouncing back from a lab mishap, learning how to fail (and try again) is “the fundamental underpinning of scientific resilience” – in essence, failing repeatedly, and picking yourself up to try again.
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- This kind of resilience, or trial and lots of error, separates those who innovate from those who quit under pressure.
- Failure is integral to creativity: Recent reviews of the creativity research literature affirm that failure is “an integral and unavoidable” part of the creative process.
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- Original ideas seldom emerge fully formed on the first attempt. By accepting potential failures and persisting through setbacks, creators can turn missteps into insights. In fact, studies find that a willingness to take risks and learn from mistakes often leads to productive innovation down the road
So to wrap things up: Keep failing, keep trying, retrying because that whole process is cultivating intelligence and resilience. Your inner critic has a function, it’s trying to stop you from doing the really dumb stuff that change your life in a negative way forever, for the every day stuff you can switch it off and just enjoy the beauty of full frontal failure.
Thanks for reading
Kai