Mistakes: portals of discovery

By Stella Cottrell

Reflect on your relationship with mistakes
Identify opportunities for development in your mistakes

Do you...?

Feel like a failure if you make mistakes?

Yes

Feel like giving up when you don’t get the grades you want?

Yes

Avoid reading tutor feedback because you fear you got things wrong?

Yes

Put off submitting your work because you’re anxious it isn’t good enough?

Yes

Feel like a failure if you make mistakes?

You selected 'Yes':

Mistakes are part and parcel of life: we all make them. What’s important is that you learn from them and take new insights and ideas forward into future projects.

You selected 'No':

Great. You recognise that mistakes are not necessarily negative.

Feel like giving up when you don’t get the grades you want?

You selected 'Yes':

If you over-worry about your work not being good enough, the positive aspect is that you care about it.

However, you might be putting too much focus on outcomes such as grades or good comments at the expense of learning from the process and gaining longer-term benefits.

You selected ‘No’:

Good. Grades alone shouldn’t dictate your mood and next steps.

Take a moment to evaluate the process and your options.

Avoid reading tutor feedback because you fear you got things wrong?

Don’t take feedback personally or as a sign that you lack ability. It is your tutor’s job to point out potential improvements or other ways of thinking.

Consider how each piece of feedback could be applied to benefit you and future assignments of different kinds.

You selected ‘No’:

That’s a good choice. You should welcome constructive feedback – take it at every opportunity you get.

Put off submitting your work because you’re anxious it isn’t good enough?

Our minds like to maintain a running commentary, or ‘self-talk’, offering opinions on how smart we are, or what we wish we had said or done. Constructive ‘self-talk’ can be a great motivator.

Consider what messages you are feeding your brain to encourage it to believe it can learn effectively and embrace study challenges.

You selected ‘No’:

That’s right, submission of work is often a good opportunity to get feedback.

Being aware of mistakes and taking care to avoid errors are generally good behaviours.

They help us to avoid all kinds of problems, from formatting references incorrectly in an assignment to burning our dinner.

But if we worry too much about mistakes, they cease to be helpful (Arnetz et al., 2017).

Making mistakes helps us learn, so we need to make some or we lose out. As James Joyce once said:

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

(after Ulysses, 1922)

Some psychologists even advocate making deliberate small errors to help overcome excessive fear of mistakes (Antony & Swinson, 2009).

Reframe your relationship with mistakes

Select the headings below to view strategies for turning past mistakes into future successes.

Add ‘yet’ to your ‘can’t’ statements. Learning is about finding a way.

Aim to do your best in the circumstances. Beyond that, aim to learn from the overall experience.

Don’t let one mistake lead to others. Don’t delay submitting an assignment – that creates new problems!

People tend to learn more from mistakes and failures than from their successes. This is true of many famous names, including inventor Thomas Edison, scientist Alexander Fleming and breakfast cereal creators John and William Kellogg. Mistakes provide a focus for improvement.

Feedback provides valuable insights on what is required or how to improve – and also highlights where others can see a different way of doing things.

If your work isn’t as good as you would like, identify what you get right already and what you need to work on. Make use of the support networks and resources available to you.

Create an action plan

Find a recent assignment and review your lecturer’s feedback. What did you do well? What could you do differently next time? Use the box below to note down details of how to carry this out.

I drew upon a range of viewpoints from reputable sources. However, my references weren't always formatted correctly and I lost a few marks for this. I have signed up for a workshop on referencing, run by my university's academic skills team, to build my confidence and skills in this area.