Progress is made of mistakes.
Not despite them. Made of them.
Every step forward carries a few wrong ones inside it. You don’t get the progress without the errors. That isn’t a motivational line — it’s just the arithmetic of moving fast with incomplete information.
So the job was never to avoid mistakes. The job is to handle them.
And handling them gets harder, not easier, the more experienced you become.
Early on, mistakes are cheap. Small blast radius. Nobody’s watching. You make one, you fix it, you move on.
Later it changes. The decisions are bigger. More people depend on them. And your own experience starts working against you — you’ve been right enough times to trust yourself more than you should. Ego and stakes rise together. The mistakes get more expensive exactly when they get harder to admit.
That’s the trap of experience. It doesn’t stop you from being wrong. It makes being wrong cost more.
The first discipline is to keep most mistakes reversible.
Some doors only open one way — the Type 1 decisions. The bet you can’t unwind. The hire you build the whole org around. The promise you can’t take back. You don’t get to be casual there.
Everything else, you should be casual about. Decide fast, stay cheap, keep the option to walk it back. Spend your caution on the one-way doors and almost nowhere else. Most mistakes are survivable. A few are not. Knowing the difference is most of the game.
And then there’s the part nobody likes.
A mistake isn’t fatal because it’s big. It’s fatal because it stays hidden.
The reversible mistake you catch early stays reversible. The same mistake, six months buried, becomes a one-way door — not because it changed, but because you ran out of room to undo it.
So the thing you actually optimize for isn’t fewer mistakes. It’s faster detection. Short feedback loops. People who feel safe telling you you’re wrong. A culture where bad news travels fast, instead of getting polished before it reaches you.
Companies rarely die from one big error. They die from a hundred small ones nobody surfaced in time.
And you don’t only have to learn from your own.
Other people’s mistakes are cheaper than yours — you get the lesson without paying for it. So read biographies. They’re full of expensive errors someone already survived and wrote down, so you don’t have to repeat them.
And talk about your own mistakes out loud. The moment you share one, people tend to share theirs back. That trade is one of the best deals there is — you walk away with a dozen failures you never had to live through.
So I’m not trying to make fewer mistakes anymore.
I’m trying to make them small, make them reversible, and make them loud.