We are surrounded by mixed messages about mistakes: we're told we earn by making them,
but we work hard to avoid them. So the result is that most of us know that we are going to make
mistakes, but deep down, we feel we shouldn't.
Experiments with schoolchildren who did well on a given test show that those who were
praised for being smart and then offered a more challenging or less challenging task afterward
usually chose the easier one. On the other hand, children praised for trying hard-rather than
being smart-far more often selected the more difficult task.
If we try hard to avoid mistakes, we aren't open to getting the information we need in
order to do better. In a writing study, experiments showed that those who are so scared to
make mistakes perform worse in writing tasks than those who aren't as worried about being
perfect. They fear receiving any kind of negative feedback, so they don't learn where they went
wrong and how to get better.
We don't just learn more when we're open to mistakes, we learn deeper. Research tells us
that if we're only concerned about getting the right answer, we don't always learn the
underlying concepts that help us truly understand whatever we're trying to figure out. Mistakes
need to be seen not as a failure to learn, but as a guide to what still needs to be learned. As
Thomas Edison said, "I am not discouraged, because every abandoned wrong attempt is
another step forward. "
Furthermore, we often make mistakes because we try new things-we wander away from
accepted paths. Teflon, penicillin-these are examples of great discoveries made by mistake.
Take a page from Albert Einstein, who said, "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never
tried anything new. "
What's the main idea of the passage?
We can never avoid making mistakes when we work. Success can't be achieved without making mistakes. Mistakes should be treated with a correct attitude. Try every means to avoid mistakes in our daily life.