Making Mistakes

Making Mistakes

When you make a mistake doing mathematics, big or small, cherish it like it’s the most precious thing in the world. Because in some ways, it is. It is your chance to learn.

Most of us have been taught from a young age that mistakes are bad, that we should try to avoid mistakes. The problem with learning mathematics is that it is absolutely impossible to learn math without getting things wrong first. The whole point is that it IS HARD! If you don’t find it difficult then you are not pushing yourself hard enough to actually change your neural pathways and learn. It’s just like wimping out in the weight room. No Pain = No Gain.

Yet without mistakes, we could not learn or grow. Mistakes make walking possible for the smallest toddler, make speech possible, make works of genius possible. Mistakes are how we learn to do something new — because if you succeed at something, it’s probably something you already knew how to do. You haven’t really grown much from that success — at most it’s the last step on your journey, not the whole journey. Most of the journey was made up of mistakes, if it’s a good journey.

Think about how we learn: we don’t just consume information about something and instantly know it or know how to do it. You don’t just read about painting, or writing, or computer programming, or baking, or playing the piano, or doing math, and know how to do them right away.

Instead, you get information about something, from reading or from another person or from observing usually … then you construct a model in your mind … then you test it out by trying it in the real world … then you make mistakes … then you revise the model based on the results of your real-world experimentation … and repeat, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, until you’ve pretty much learned how to do something.

That’s how we learn as babies and toddlers, and how we learn as adults. Trial and error, learning something new from each error.

In this sense, we all suck at math. And through our mistakes we are all getting better at it.

This article was adapted from a post by Leo Babauta at http://zenhabits.net.