Brian Johnson explains how to treat mistakes as learning data instead of failures. He suggests returning mentally to the error, turning it into practice, and accepting that rough days outnumber perfect ones. Elite performers respond deliberately to poor performances rather than spiraling.
Oops. You may have an oops day. Oh, I had these high ideals and I fell short. Go back to the point in time where you made the mistake, and rather than beat yourself up and replay the scene again and again, you wonder to yourself, how could I have done that differently? If I had done it optimally, what would I have done? Then you turn that oops into a game, right? Because it's data. You're taking notes and saying, oh, when I do that, this happens. Therefore, let me see what I can do to do that a little bit better. Then you have your masterpiece days. Oops days. And then you have your rebound days. Jim Afrom works with a bunch of elite athletes. He says the best among them, the absolute best, know they're gonna miss some shots, but they know how to play poorly. Well, they don't spin out and lose it. You're either gonna see, wow, I just created a masterpiece day. In which case you say, that's like me. And you feast on it. You may have an oops day. Well, guess what? That's going to happen more often than your masterpiece day, and that's fine. There are no perfect human beings. We don't need you to be perfect in order to change your life.
