Obstacles and Mistakes – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

Three tools to stay on the road

Photo by Brusk Dede on Unsplash

What lies behind getting things wrong? What’s the upside? How do we know whether we really made a mistake? Children are born experimenters, and they may be the best teachers of how to learn from obstacles and keep going by putting a key ingredient to work: what they learn. Experimenting is a constant process that should never stop in our lives. But what should we do differently? Which experiments? We tend to focus only on results and goals and pay little or no attention to the road itself and everything it can teach us.

Getting it wrong can sound rather negative. We live in a culture of perfection, where everything good has to work right away. There’s no room for error and no room for obstacles along the way. As Ryan Holiday puts it in The Obstacle Is the Way, looking closely at an obstacle and reflecting on it gives us our richest source of resources for facing it and acting our way through. Obstacles, stones in the road, errors and mistakes are part of life and part of the journey. Every road has them, and plenty of them. So is there anything good in them, and what else fills the road?

First, every obstacle holds something powerful: the lesson learned. I’ve written other posts about lessons learned, a concept I picked up from project management, and about how important it is to stop and write down what went well, what went badly and what could have gone better after a challenge or a mistake. Skip the exercise and it will almost certainly happen again, and harder. It may be the cure for making the same mistake twice. It isn’t easy, however simple the questions sound, but the answers you capture will reveal vital information to keep you on course.

Second, when a road has a clear purpose, it becomes much clearer that everything that happens to us, even what seems bad, brings us closer to the destination and the result. This is another big challenge, because we almost never start a plan, objective or goal by asking, "What purpose guides us, or will guide us, toward this destination?" To do more than endure, to overcome every challenge, every great test, every sorrow and every hardship, we need a powerful tool, and only a purpose gives us that strength.

Third, mistakes are just like achievements. Seen through the right lens, mistakes bring us closer to the goal. If we’re clear that the road has a north (a purpose), that it holds obstacles of every kind (so the odds of getting something wrong are 100%) and that learning matters as much as achieving, then we’re riding in the vehicle that will carry us ever closer to any goal. One last ingredient is missing: owning the job of driving that vehicle, and every action, every mistake and every lesson learned.

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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