Excellence is not the opposite of failure: we can never create excellent performances by only fixing poor ones. Mistake fixing is just a tool to prevent failure.

The instinct to exhort people to do their best work in challenging times is understandable. It’s tempting to believe that if we just hunker down, we can avoid failure altogether. It’s also wrong. The relationship between effort and success is imperfect. The world around us changes constantly and keeps presenting us with new situations. The best-laid plans encounter problems in an uncertain context. Even when people work hard and are committed to doing the right thing, failure is always possible in a new situation. Sure, sometimes failures are caused by people who are careless or don’t work hard, but even hard work can end in failure when a situation is new and different or some unexpected event happens. Finally, and most perversely, sometimes sheer luck allows you to mail it in and succeed anyway.

Owning our errors becomes easier when we accept human fallibility as a fact and put that acceptance to use in learning and improving. In the most successful teams in my research, people, especially team leaders, talk about the ever-present chance that things will go wrong. They are honest and good-humored about mistakes, which nurtures the psychological safety you need for people to speak up quickly about them. This is a best practice—in families, too, not just work teams—if you want to reduce basic failures.

Everyone makes mistakes because everyone has limitations. Even you. Trying to avoid responsibility for your decisions, your actions, or their outcomes, though, is tantamount to pretending you don’t have limitations. One thing that sets exceptional people apart from the crowd is how they handle mistakes and whether they learn from them and do better as a result.

Mistakes present a choice: whether to update your ideas, or ignore the failures they’ve produced and keep believing what you’ve always believed. More than a few of us choose the latter.

The biggest mistake people make typically isn’t their initial mistake. It’s the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it. The first mistake is expensive; the second costs a fortune.