Should you be tolerant of all mistakes? Are all mistakes good?

A good mistake comes from an honest effort to try something combined with a diligent attempt to execute it well. A bad mistake is one where an idea fails primarily because of sloppy, inattentive, or indifferent effort. Saying “mistakes are valuable” should not be interpreted as, “we don’t have to try to do our best.” It’s one thing to put the wrong product on the market, it’s another to do a sloppy job of putting the product on the market.

The worst mistakes, however, are those that are repeated over and over again. It is the lesson learned from a mistake that makes it valuable, not the mistake itself.

As we’ve seen, what’s most striking when we look at excellent performance is not the absence of deficit but, rather, the presence of a few signature strengths, honed over time and put to ever greater use. But still the idea of fixing deficits appeals to us—it gives us the hope that we might corral, and thus tame, our imperfections, and it allows us to make amends for our shortcomings by toiling to fix them. And the fact that this toil is usually far from joyful is part of the allure.

... the truth is that large success is the aggregation of small successes, and that therefore improvement consists of finding out, in each trial, what works, seizing hold of it, and figuring out how to make more of it. Failure by itself doesn’t teach us anything about success, just as our deficits by themselves don’t teach us anything about our strengths. And the moment we begin to get better is the moment when something actually works, not when it doesn’t.

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.

Whether tragic (a lost life) or silly (spilled milk), waste can be reduced through the diligent application of good failure practices. Basic failures are the most preventable of the three types. Excellent companies strive to prevent as many basic failures as they can. The chances are that you wish to do so as well. This is why we cannot afford to ignore mistakes. Basic failure’s ubiquity. serves as an invitation to strive to minimize it. My goal is to make basic failures fewer and further between. (It’s the opposite of how we think about intelligent failures, which I believe we should strive to increase, to accelerate innovation, learning, and personal growth.) But behaviors and systems that prevent basic failure can save lives, create immense economic value, and bring personal satisfaction.