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Motivational Monday - The Fear of Making Mistakes

Motivational Monday - The Fear of Making Mistakes

The Bull and the Bard: Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday

Iain Shirlaw
April 15, 2024

Hi there,

Welcome to Motivational Monday. Last Monday we discussed the power of investing in your future self in terms of education, fitness, and investing. In today’s newsletter, I want to discuss why you should not be afraid to make mistakes.

Motivational Monday: the Fear of Making Mistakes

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes

Letting go of the fear of making mistakes is crucial, as they are an unavoidable part of the development process. When you were a child and you learned to ride a bicycle, did you fall off? Almost certainly. Hopefully, you just got back on and tried again until you mastered it. Looking back, do you view this repetition of falling and trying again as a necessary process that you had to go through before you could become a confident rider?

I believe that it is exactly the same with education, fitness and investing. Not only are mistakes inevitable, they are a necessary part of development.

Education and language learning in particular

I don’t have any students who never make mistakes when learning English. They would not need English lessons if this were the case. Additionally, even mother-tongue speakers regularly make mistakes - as do I!

The hardest students to teach are the ones who are frightened to try new language fearing that they make a mistake.

Fitness

When you are training you will inevitably have aches or pains or get injured sometimes. In these cases, you must listen to your body and ask yourself if you have been overtraining or not warming up properly. But the person who never trains for fear of getting injured will definitely not get fit!

Investing

And so it is with investing. We discussed on Friday how not investing can harm your financial future due to debasement of currency.

However, investing mistakes are sometimes the hardest to cope with psychologically. No one likes to lose money.

It should be noted that, just because an investment goes down after we buy it, it was not necessarily a mistake to buy it. No one can time the market perfectly and better results often come to those who don’t try.

Just like with education and fitness, some mistakes are inevitable while others can and should always be avoided.

In next week's Finance Friday newsletter will explore strategies for minimizing investment risks.

A 600,000 dollar mistake!

What would you do if an employee made a mistake that cost your company 600,000 dollars? That happened to IBM while Thomas John Watson was its CEO. His reaction is interesting:

“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. “No”, I replied. “I just spent $600,000 training him – why would I want somebody to hire his experience?”

If you had done this, how would your boss react?
Think of a time you made a mistake at work or university. How did you learn from it?
How can companies create a culture that encourages learning from mistakes?