Mistakes: Definition, Examples, & How To Learn From Them

By Kelsey Schultz, Ph.D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Making mistakes can be embarrassing and sometimes painful, but mistakes are important opportunities for learning and personal growth. Keep reading for more on mistakes and how to learn from them.
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Many of us move through life with a fear of making mistakes. We spend our precious time extrapolating wildly about different possible futures and wrestling with ourselves over which future we prefer. We may even struggle with even mundane decisions, as we worry about a future in which we have chosen something different. The reality, though, is that we can’t avoid making mistakes, no matter how much time and care we put into our deliberations. 
Luckily, making mistakes can be good for us if we know how to analyze and respond to them. Let’s talk more about mistakes and how we can use them as a valuable means of personal growth.
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What Is A Mistake? (A Definition)

A mistake can be defined as behavior that results from an error in judgment, inadequate or inaccurate knowledge, or a lack of attention. Usually, a mistake is something that we later regret or that causes some amount of struggle, loss, or pain.

Why Mistakes Are Important

Mistakes are important because they help us learn and grow into better versions of ourselves when we respond to them effectively. Making mistakes is part of being human and it is something we can learn to embrace and use as a way to improve our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. 

Neuroscience research even suggests that mistakes are actually an important part of learning. For example, researchers have shown that when trying to get a mouse to associate the sound of a tone with a reward, the learning is faster and stronger when the mice predict a reward after a tone and are wrong from time to time (Watabe-Uchida et al., 2017).

This is because brains (both mouse brains and our brains) are set up to make predictions and then determine the accuracy of those predictions. When there is a discrepancy between the prediction and the outcome, our brains release molecules called neurotransmitters, which essentially send a signal saying “hey, something is off here, let’s remember that.” Our brains’ response to this discrepancy, also known as prediction error, is a powerful learning mechanism and is so reliable that it has become a central feature of neuroscientific models of learning and behavior.

Other neuroscientific models of learning – specifically those that pertain to learning a new motor skill such as tennis or roller skating – suggest that mistakes are important because they help narrow down the range of all possible movements to the ones that are correct. This is based on the idea that there are substantially more ways to get something wrong than to get something right. So, by making mistakes we are basically engaging in a process of elimination that will make getting it right easier down the line. This famous quote ascribed to Thomas Edison is a perfect summary of this line of thinking: “I haven’t failed, I’ve simply found 1000 ways that don’t work.”
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Though making mistakes can certainly be disappointing and painful at times, it is a vital (and inevitable) part of learning and growing. A mistake is only a problem when we refuse to learn from it or, when possible, correct it.

Mistakes Examples (Mistakes People Make)

The different kinds of mistakes we can possibly make are nearly infinite. We can make mistakes at home, at work, with our loved ones, with strangers, or with ourselves. Some mistakes have immediate consequences and others take a while before we might notice them. Some can be corrected and others we have to learn to live with. Though the mistakes we might make in life are innumerable, there are a few that are much more common than others. Here are a few examples of typical mistakes people make that you might also have some experience with:
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  • Allowing people to push you around/ being a doormat
  • Being a bully
  • Cheating on a partner
  • Cheating on a test
  • Dating the wrong person
  • Not listening to the advice of your doctor
  • Overeating
  • Forgetting birthdays or anniversaries
  • Drinking in excess
  • Driving while distracted
  • Lying
  • Overspending
  • Procrastinating
  • Accidentally hitting “reply all” on a sensitive email
  • Texting the wrong person
  • Losing your temper
  • Jumping to conclusions before getting all the facts
  • Neglecting to check the validity of the sources before sharing posts and articles on the internet
  • Referring to someone using incorrect pronouns

How To Move Past Mistakes

Self-forgiveness is an important step in moving past our mistakes. Being hung up on our mistakes typically implies that we aren’t able to forgive ourselves for our errors or transgressions. We ruminate on our mistakes and use our mistakes as tools for psychological self-harm. To move past this state of being stuck, we have to let go of the disappointment and resentment toward ourselves that we are holding.

Self-forgiveness means acknowledging the wrong we have done while letting go of self-resentment and showing ourselves compassion, generosity, and love (Enright, 1996). There are three critical components of self-forgiveness: self-acceptance​, willingness to accept accountability, and a genuine effort to change. 

If we want to forgive ourselves and move past our mistakes, it is important that we first accept that we are an imperfect being that makes mistakes. Without accepting that mistakes are part of being human, forgiving ourselves becomes nearly impossible. It is also important that our process of self-forgiveness includes accountability. In other words, accepting responsibility for the mistake we made is an essential piece of forgiving ourselves for it. Finally, to truly move on from our mistakes, it is important that we make a genuine effort to prevent the same mistake from occurring again. Becoming a better person in response to a mistake is the best way to move past it.

How To Learn From Mistakes

Making mistakes is more than an inevitable part of life, it is an essential part of learning. In fact, some neuroscientists suggest that all learning occurs through mistakes (Chialvo & Bak, 1999). Learning occurs via plasticity, or the creation of new connections between brain cells. The stronger these connections become, the stronger our learning is. When you successfully try something new and it feels good, learning occurs. This is known as positive reinforcement. 

Science shows us that learning can also occur through negative reinforcement. In other words, when you are unsuccessful and it feels bad, learning still occurs. Scientific models of learning through negative reinforcement show that negative reinforcement learning can be even stronger and more efficient than learning through positive reinforcement (Chialvo & Bak, 1999). This finding suggests that it is actually better to make mistakes than to get it right the first time.

The idea that making mistakes is an effective and efficient way to learn has been supported by research on best teaching practices, also known as pedagogical research. The process of teaching by encouraging mistakes is known as productive failure (Kapur, 2008). Pedagogical research has shown that when students are taught new mathematical principles using the productive failure approach, they outperform students who are taught using the traditional approach (in which they are shown how to correctly solve the problem; Kapur, 2008).

Despite its evident benefits for our learning, making mistakes doesn’t feel good and can sometimes have negative impacts on our self-efficacy and goal commitment. Given the downsides associated with making mistakes, there are a few tricks that we may need to employ to be able to fully benefit from them. These tricks include re-framing your mistake (also known as cognitive reappraisal), owning your mistake, and analyzing your mistake. Let’s dig a little more into each of these strategies.

Reframing Mistakes​
Reframing your mistake refers to changing your perspective of what that mistake means in the broader context of your life. For example, let’s say you accidentally present incorrect information in an important meeting. Rather than beating yourself up for your mistake, you could reframe it as an experience in which you learned to double-check your sources and the accuracy of your information before your next meeting. When managing your response to making a mistake, remember that despite how disappointed or uncomfortable they may make you feel, mistakes can do wonders in helping us learn and grow.

Owning Mistakes
We might feel compelled to shift blame to others for our mistakes to avoid feelings of shame and discomfort. However, shifting blame away from ourselves prevents us from gleaning the benefits mistakes have to offer. Truly learning from our mistakes requires us to examine where we went wrong, and what we could have done better so that we can avoid making the same mistake in the future.

Analyzing Mistakes
Analyzing our mistakes refers to asking ourselves questions about the mistake, its context, and what led up to it. For example, you might ask the following questions of yourself after making a mistake:
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  • What were my motivations?
  • What was I attempting to achieve?
  • Why did I choose the course of action that I chose?
  • How might I ensure that I take the appropriate course of action in the future if a similar situation arises?
  • What opportunities for personal growth does this mistake offer me?

Research has shown that asking these questions and comparing our answers against what we can retroactively identify as the correct course of action is a powerful learning tool (Loibl & Leuders, 2019).

For more on how we can learn from our mistakes, check out these TED talks:

Video: Diana Laufenberg: How to Learn From Mistakes

Video: Learning From Mistakes

Quotes on Mistakes

  • ​“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” – Denis Waitley
  • “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” – George Bernard Shaw
  • “Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.” – Bruce Lee
  • “I'm not perfect; I make mistakes all the time. All I can do is to try my best to learn from my mistakes, take responsibility for them, and do a better job tomorrow.” – Lana
  • “Today I choose life. Every morning when I wake up I can choose joy, happiness, negativity, pain... To feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make mistakes and choices - today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity but embrace it.” – Kevyn Aucoin
  • “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” – Oscar Wilde
  • “Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.” – Mary Tyler Moore
  • “If you're not making mistakes, then you're not doing anything. I'm positive that a doer makes mistakes.” – John Wooden
  • “A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.” – John C. Maxwell
  • “If you live long enough, you'll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you'll be a better person. It's how you handle adversity, not how it affects you. The main thing is never quit, never quit, never quit.” – William J. Clinton
  • “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” – Steve Jobs
  • “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” – Johnny Cash

Articles Related to Mistakes

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Mistakes​

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Mistakes

Try as we might, we will all make mistakes from time to time. Though some mistakes may be painful or costly, they aren’t necessarily bad because they provide us with the opportunity to learn and grow as individuals. Mistakes show us where we were ignorant or misguided. They allow us to see with more clarity the room we have to grow. In fact, neuroscience shows us that mistakes are something that we need in order to learn. Without them, we would be stagnant. When we accept our fallibility and recognize mistakes as learning opportunities we can embrace them with gratitude and move on with self-love and self-compassion.

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