Peter Winick argues that successful people should make only new mistakes, not repeat ones others have already made. Research what's been tried before, learn from those failures, then focus your energy on novel errors that actually move your work forward.
Peter Winick here with Thought Leadership Leverage, and today I want to talk to you about your mistakes. When you're pursuing your goals, making mistakes is an unavoidable part of the process. Some folks are so afraid of failure that they don't allow themselves to make any mistakes at all and end up refusing to take any chances or try new things. This ultimately limits their chances of success. That's obviously crippling their innovation, but recklessly jumping at any half-baked idea is as equally destructive. The middle ground that I recommend is committing to only making new mistakes. Defining a mistake is really the key issue. There isn't a group on the planet that comes up with more ideas than thought leaders. We tend to favor our own ideas. If we don't think they're brilliant, then who else would, right? But often we come up with ideas that seem new because they may be new to us and decide to move forward in an aggressive way to see if it has legs. What I'd suggest for thought leaders that come up with something new is to assume someone has already done it before. The odds are good that someone's tried working in that space before, but that doesn't mean you can't. Other people's efforts provide new opportunities to learn from their mistakes With a minimal cost to us, invest the time and energy researching your vision. If there's someone else in that space, what can you glean from that? If it's wide open, then get ready to break ground. The objective shouldn't be to dismiss your ideas unworthy, but to seek mistakes that others have made doing something comparable. If you can eliminate making the same mistake that others have done and commit to only making new mistakes, you will be able to fail. And more importantly, succeed faster. It may sound like a contradiction, but hear me out. Focus on allowing yourself to make new mistakes by building on what others have learned. Then constantly tweak and adjust your ideas as you go. Ask yourself, if I do X and it's a mistake, would it be a new mistake or just new to me? If it's only new to you, it isn't a mistake worth making. Commit to finding a better one. Thank you.
