Mistakes aren't generally fatal

There's a huge difference between not knowing about something that I've never looked at, and not knowing about something I have looked at. Just looking at it is progress, because my ignorance now has a focus
~ James Marcus Bach


When you first start to learn something almost everything you do is likely to be wrong. So if your priority is to avoid mistakes then you will never even take the first step.

In his book Deep Learning, Stellan Ohlsson makes the point that learning is about gaining a more and more precise knowledge of what it is you are trying to learn and eliminating things that don't work:

If the main cause of errors is that the initial rules for a task tend to be overly general, then to adapt a strategy to a task is to gradually specialize those rules by incorporating more and more information about the task environment into them

But the only way to do this is to learn from the mistakes we make:

Errors play an active role in their own elimination; we unlearn errors by learning from them

So the thing to fear is not making mistakes but failing to use them to improve our performance. Mistakes are a signal that you still have something to learn, that there is a gap in your knowledge, that there may be something you have misunderstood. What they aren't is a sign of personal lack.

The fact is that what any single person knows as a percentage of all that is known collectively by humanity is incredibly small, and it is infinitesmally small compared to what remains to be known. All of us have huge areas of ignorance and the point of learning is not to know everything but rather to become competent in the things which are important to us.

The video below illustrates how even great artists make mistakes but by correcting them arrive at works of genius:




The point is to examine what we have done, to see where we may have gone wrong, and then use this knowledge as a platform for advancing further. 

Mistakes are only messengers, not judges; they play a role in advancing our learning but when we succesfully learn we transcend our former errors and leave them behind as we move into new and unfamiliar territory and make higher level errors. If we treat errors as friends who advise us of where we need to look to improve rather than enemies who simply point out our inadequacies, then we will advance more rapidly in anything we choose to learn.