Conversation

Irrecoverable mistakes don’t turn into failures until they suppress early recognition of someone succeeding where you didn’t. There’s not a whole lot others can learn from your mistakes, but mistakes do help you recognize things being done right earlier than others do.
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The meta-mistake that turns irrecoverable mistakes into failures is not realizing that you missed something that you won’t see until someone else comes along and actually sees it. Then you go, “oh shit, that’s the key thing I missed.”
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There’s a temptation to view mistakes as learnings as a consolation prize. That despite the irrecoverable mistake you’ve “figured it out” and would do it right if only someone would give you a do-over. This is usually a false conceit. You’re almost certainly missing a piece.
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That conceit allows you to pretend you’re a wise elder who has all the info necessary for the next person to try to get it right. This is weakness. When someone finds the missing piece and avoids your mistake, what you do next determines whether *your* mistake turns into failure.
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You can either pretend their new piece is trivial and you essentially knew the right answer all along (the “X, you invented X” snark) or you can recognize that they’ve gone past your end point and might at least make interesting new mistakes you didn’t have the privilege to.
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A mistake that ends your turn in the game turns into a failure only if your own finite game is the only one you can see. When you can see how the infinite game can continue in what others are doing, it’s merely a role shift.
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Being among those who made one of the previous set of interesting mistakes makes you better able to spot the next step done right. The graceless thing to do is to use that early vision to trivialize the new as minor/incremental, BIRG, write yourself into winning narrative etc.
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The thing to do is get behind the person who hit the target you couldn’t see on your turn, and become a connoisseur spectator from a front row seat. Help others appreciate what’s going on, why it matters, and how it advances the game in ways that may be invisible to newbies.
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You may not be able to help. The lessons you learned in the last battle may be irrelevant. But the one thing you can bring to the new party is a cultivated, appreciative eye. Even if the game progresses in ways that show you were even wronged than you thought on your turn.
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In some ways, your life story is merely a list of all the mistakes you had the privilege of being the first to make, to your knowledge. These usually tell a more interesting tale than your successes
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