I recently stumbled across a song from the great musician, Sun Ra called Make a Mistake. The lyric is simply,
You made a mistake, you did something wrong
You made another mistake, you did something right.
The recent documentary, Goodnight Oppy, tells the story of the Mars Rover named Opportunity (Oppy). Before Oppy succeeded, a previous Mars Rover exploded on landing because the engineers had designed components measured in centimeters that were mistakenly built using inches. But they didn’t give up.
Sir Alexander Fleming was so frustrated with his experiments trying to find a “wonder drug” that he threw everything away. Then he noticed, days later, that the mold growing in one of the petri dishes was killing all the bacteria and penicillin was born.
There is a quote attributed to Albert Einstein in 1995: “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” I even attributed it to him in my latest book. However I learned that this quote can be traced back to at least the early 19th century and is probably much older. My mistake.
When I first encountered the idea of “investing in failure,” allowing myself to intentionally do a movement badly, or inhibit my chances of success, I was amazed at the sensation of freedom in being relieved of needing to “do it right.”
One year, while teaching a program called Moving Across the Page at an “at risk” school in the South Bronx, I was asked to help the children with penmanship. Ironically, when I was a child, I struggled with penmanship, and was punished severely in school for writing “wrong.”
I tried the Feldenkrais approach. I invited the children to write a sentence. Then they repeated writing it – with their non-dominant hand, while standing up and dancing, without moving their fingers, with their eyes closed, and finally, to write as badly as possible. One little girl exclaimed in delight, “I am making such a mess!” When they wrote again at the end, and compared their sentences, they were amazed that they were able to improve by intentionally failing.
You make another mistake, you did something right.
I was raised to never admit failure or mistakes. In this excerpt from my book, You’ve Got the Power!, I hope you enjoy my story of how that backfired.