I live in terror of making mistakes. I always have. In all the study of grit, resilience, persistence, etc., it’s well-established that fear of making mistakes paralyzes people and keeps them from building new knowledge. Well, that’s me in a textbook. 

It occurred to me today that we are 4 billion years of mistakes. When a cell replicates with a mistake, that’s a mutation. Millions of mistakes yield millions of failures – and one in a million times, or a billion times, a mistake is such an improvement over the previous state of affairs that the mistake quickly becomes the most-preferred way getting the job done – of getting the pollen moved around, of birthing the next generation, of swimming through the water. Cells aren’t trying to make mistakes, and the vast majority are failures. But it only takes one successful mistake to shoot life off in a new direction altogether.

And these successful mistakes are everywhere. In the infinite variety of the plant and animal species around us, every one is the result of a mistake that worked out great. A mistake that went better than the original plan. 

 In nature, some mutations are neutral, and some are life-ending. My mistakes feel that way sometimes. I still hate making mistakes. But some mistakes provide a radical way of doing things differently that is so much better than the previous state of affairs, we wonder why we didn’t think of doing it that way before. Hopefully it doesn’t take millions of mistakes to get there; only a few dozen – a couple hundred at the most.

The great evolutionary leaps forward came because a radical change in the environment meant that the critters had to change quickly or die off (and the dying happens plenty). When I make a big mistake, that’s when the quickest and most dramatic growth occurs. Fortunately, unlike in the natural world, human mistakes aren’t usually fatal. In fact, since we have infinite potential to make mistakes, we have infinite potential to grow. 

My terror of mistakes is because I don’t want you to think badly of me. But even when you do think badly of me, you pressure me to change – usually as quickly as possible. So…thanks for thinking badly of me, I guess? Change is how I grow – how I’m better at being Stef than I was last week. My human mistakes, fortunately, are more likely to spur growth than to kill me off. And sometimes, the new version is so much better than the previous version that I can be grateful for every mistake.