Is making mistakes always as bad as we used to think? Are people who don’t make them really so good? When I think about making mistakes I imagine two cooks: one is strictly following recipes ingredient by ingredient and latter experimenting. For sure the first one will never screw up the dish but he will never make something new. We all know a lot of people who repeat their routine precisely day by day. I know even more of those who work in a constant fear to be fired for making just a little mistake.

But do they really progress that much? Do they have chance to be a good manager who needs to make decisions very often? I really doubt. How many companies lose money every day because their management is afraid to make a mistake i.e. make a decision at all which means decisions are delayed and time is lost? And there is pendulum effect when someone always needs to have an alternative to make a decision. Then it goes back and forth, back and forth. Some of the projects were never done because of this.

Well, nobody’s perfect and if you don’t make mistakes sometimes means that you don’t have initiate, you do less than you should. You prevent yourself from having a chance and getting most valuable experience you can ever get. Famous inventor Thomas Edison sometimes made hundreds of experiments which ended in failure before he got a successful one.

Do you know how Niels Bohr defined an expert? ‘An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field’. So make mistakes, learn and advance.