We all make them. All the time.
Sometimes, the impact of a single mistake can be severe.
Other times, mistakes means nothing.
When thought of in this way, mistakes wield this strange power.
They are like an unwelcome and unplanned house guest.
We never plan on them showing up and yet we have to deal with them when they do.
This isn't a post about how to avoid mistakes.
This post is my attempt to understand these mystical things a bit more.
I like to keep things simple, so let's look at mistakes on two dimensions:
Likelihood: What are the chances of the mistake happening?
Impact: What is the cost (financially, emotionally, physically, relationally) of making the mistake?
Now for a simple 2x2:
Some quick examples of each:
No Big Deal: Imagine you're in a hobby band with some friends and you play a single wrong chord once on the guitar in the middle of four minute song that you've practiced a bunch of times. It's highly likely that no one (other than you) will notice, let alone care. The pressure of the moment just got to you. Oh well.
Can Deal With It: This is forgetting to pack underwear with the backup clothes for our kids when we go somewhere and one of them decides to get completely soaked. It's high likelihood because underwear is small (this happens with socks too) and it's one thing on the list of 100 things you have to pack whenever you take children anywhere.
Unluckily Screwed: When we used to get our car serviced, we would get issued a sticker that got placed on the top-left of our windscreen that said when our next service was due. I am a bit of a rule follower and 99 times out of 100 I would take the car in before the service was due. Once, I didn't. My wife was driving the car with our son inside and when she was pulling out of a parking lot, the front-right passenger wheel sort of ... broke. No one was injured. You might look at this mistake and say it was very preventable, and on one hand I would agree with you. I've also come to realize that preventing these kinds of mistakes rely on human beings to be perfect, and unfortunately, we're just not.
Big Deal: I think these are often driven by particular situations. Often ones where your mental capacity is weak or stressed in some way. Last week I shared a small story where my wife and I had to do something very important after getting off a 20+ hour international flight with both of our kids. The likelihood of making a mistake in this situation was high because our mental capacity was weak. The impact was also high because we were trying to deal with a customs form that would help us enter the country with no issues. Short version of the story: There were issues.
As I said earlier, the point of this post wasn't to figure out how to avoid these mistakes.
It was to get to know them better.
