Mistakes Are Data

There is a saying that shows up fairly often when people talk about practice: "The master has failed more than the novice has tried." This is good and wise and true. No expert would deny it. But, how do we make this wisdom a part of our journey toward expertise?All mistakes are data.

Whenever I have had students who find themselves feeling discouraged, I find it helps to reframe whatever struggle they are having as data collection. That makes the event more emotionally neutral, and helps with root cause analysis-- if something went wrong, we need to figure out what it was.

Hint: it's almost always an error in technique or timing, and never a character flaw, personal failure, or weakness in spirit. 

I like to recount how I learned to be able to perform the girata of the left foot (or scanso della vita, if you prefer): in sparring, I would invite along the inside line and try the move as a response to an attack. I did nothing else. 

It took me about 3 months to get it right once. 

From there, I used that single successful instance to build a suite of similar actions and outcomes. Now, I use that technique and related ones as an integral part of my repertoire. 

So how do you do the same thing? The secret is to humble yourself in the pursuit of data. I lost a lot of passes. A lot. That could have made me feel like the technique was impossible for me, or too hard now, or whatever else. Instead, I set ego aside and learned what I could.

If you try something 1000 times and it works 50 of them, congratulations: you have 950 situations to not repeat ever again. They didn't work! Think about why that is. Odds are you made a mistake in mechanics or timing. Identify the mistake and fix it.

Even better, you have 50 instances to make happen again. I'll bet that if you examine those 50 successes you'll find they're really only a handful of similar events repeated several times. Now you have patterns of success: do those more. Make those successes your base action and branch out from there. Once you have found the healthy branch, cut the rest down and see how far you can get what's left to grow.

When people don't do this work they end up with 200 failures and maybe no successes, so they give up before learning has a chance to show itself. 

Don't give up. Let the branch grow and bear fruit.