Here’s my goal for this year – Make more mistakes.
Yes, you read that right. For most of my life I have played it safe. Too safe. Maybe that made me a good engineer. Then again, maybe not.
The more I go along in building my business, the more I realize and appreciate the value of making mistakes. Lots of them.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not out to waste vast amounts of money. I’m still eager to avoid making huge and costly blunders. But, I am working hard to train myself that it’s OK to be less than perfect. And write the cost of the mistakes off as education.
In launching my business, I studied people who have gone before me. I have made it a point to try to avoid the mistakes they have made. This has been helpful – to a point. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that by trying so hard to avoid other people’s mistakes, I’ve been unwilling to make enough of my own mistakes.
My degree is in electrical engineering. In my first job, I did both hardware and software design. I found out quickly that I was much better at software than hardware. Why? Because I made lots of mistakes and fixing mistakes in software is much easier than in hardware. Hardware is a one-shot deal. You design the whole thing, review it as much as possible, commit it to production, and hope you got it right. (We did not have fancy hardware simulation tools that most good engineering shops use now.)
Over many years, I became a very good software engineer (it’s not bragging if it’s true). I favored the iterative approach to writing code. Write some, test it, fix the bugs, write some more, repeat. The key was to test frequently and avoid getting in so deep that you had to rewrite huge amounts of code.
That’s what I’m trying to recapture as an approach in my business. Do a little at a time, test it, see if it’s working, adjust and move ahead.
This can only work if I allow myself to make mistakes along the way. By doing things a little at a time, I hope those mistakes are not catastrophic.
As I look back on my life and the choices I’ve made, I find it interesting that writing software is the only place where I truly took this iterative approach. And it is the thing I was the best at doing. (I only stopped because I had to due to a physical injury – a long story for another time.)
Wish me luck. Now go make some mistakes of your own.
