Find Mistakes Interesting
by Michael Feeley
I’m relearning French. Reading, writing, speaking — some of it familiar, some of it brand new. Masculine and feminine. Present and past. Vocabulary. And I’m making mistakes. Plenty of them.
I expected this. Mistakes are not a surprise. They are the material that makes for growth and change.
Here’s what I’m noticing: when I stopped judging my mistakes, I started finding them interesting. Not painful. Not proof of failure. Interesting. A wrong verb ending tells me something. A mismatched gender tells me something. Each mistake is information, not an indictment.
This is also a choice. I chose to learn French. No one required it of me. And that choice changes everything. When you choose the challenge, the mistakes belong to you too. They’re not happening to you. They’re part of what you asked for.
This ease with mistakes is spreading. I’m seeing it show up in other rooms of my life — in work, in writing, in the daily business of being human. The same curiosity. The same steadiness. Mistakes can be fixed. That’s the whole point of them.
I didn’t choose French to be perfect at it. I chose it to learn. The mistakes are proof I’m doing exactly what I set out to do.
Be curious about your mistakes. Study them the way you’d study a language, learning AI, accounting — with patience, without shame, expecting to get things wrong on the way to getting them right.
The mistake is not the failure. Looking away from it and berating yourself is.
Thanks – Michael (he, him)
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This matters too – Learning All the Time.
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