Hey friends π
Happy Monday - another week producing shareholder value π«‘
Today I want to share a reflection I had after some L's I took last week. I hope it's something that resonates with you as you inevitably make your own mistakes this week and beyond.
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Cheers,
Brock
This Week's Thought
On reflection, I went on a bit of a rollercoaster from a work perspective last week.
I believe there are some mistakes which you have to accept that you're going to make if you're stretching to grow your skills.
Optimal growth comes on the border of what you know and what you don't know.
Spending time only on what you know means that you aren't being challenged, and that's no way to develop yourself.
Spending time only on what you don't know is a bit of a recipe for disaster - you'll likely end up stressed and burnt out, and because you were so far out of your depth you may not actually comprehend what happened (limiting what you can learn from it).
When you are spending time on things which leverage what you already know, but take you into uncharted territories, that's when you grow the quickest.
But when you're in uncharted territories, you don't always know the best way to navigate them, and you're going to make mistakes.
That's my personal reflection for the week just gone. I took on a handful of tasks that I'd never done before, and a couple of them caused me issues and stressed me out as a result (more than they should have).
In reflecting on my mistakes in an attempt to figure out what I will do differently in future, I realised that the mistakes I made were a natural consequence of my inexperience in the specific tasks I was doing.
If I had have done everything in my power to avoid the mistakes in the first place, I probably would have wasted days and bugged so many people around me - I actually think pushing through to make quick mistakes was a better option than labouring to find the optimal way of handling the situation.
There are exceptions to this rule where things are truly critical to get 100% right the first time, but I believe these are less frequent than we like to make ourselves believe.
So, while initially frustrated with myself over the errors I made, I've now come to realise that it would have been extremely unreasonable (and maybe arrogant?) to think that I would not make those mistakes on the first shot.
The key is that I now understand those tasks better and have made sure I've got the knowledge for next time. They're "one and done" mistakes.
How It's Applied
I think the application of this idea is to ask yourself after you've made a mistake: "is this an inevitable mistake that anyone in my situation would make, or should I have avoided it?".
In some cases, a mistake is just to be expected - you're doing new shit, and part of being in the zone of optimal growth is that it involves making mistakes sometimes.
Other times, you make an error you know you shouldn't have.
I think knowing the difference between these two is key.
Have a question, story, or just want to share your thoughts?
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