The importance of becoming good at identifying mistakes and avoiding their compounding

The thing about mistakes and/or failures—which also applies to success—is that once the ball gets rolling it’s easy to let them compound and lose track of the whole situation.

One mistake rolls into the other and continues the pattern. So, one important skill/quality you may want to consider is becoming adept at identifying mistakes early on as they arise and course-correcting fast.

Easier said than done, certainly. This is a mostly rationalist view of mistakes and decision-making more broadly. In the moment when they arise, mistakes may feel blurry and unclear—how do you know if something is a mistake? Fundamentally, you want to look at your desired outcome before taking the action and what the actual result is. To what degree is there a mismatch between the two? The greater the mismatch, the more likely you can think of the action/decision that led to the result as a mistake.

Then there is the question of confounding variables. How do you identify causality between the action/decision and the outcome? You do so by removing as many guesses and elements of uncertainty as possible from the decision/action. You will likely never be fully sure about the causal relationship between your actions and the outcome because there are too many factors to process and nail down that’s usually impossible for a human to do currently. But you can use probabilistic thinking and statistics to parse out signals from noise and narrow down the options. That means that you can be more certain about some things than others.

To spot mistakes and course-correct effectively, you must adopt an attitude of truth-seeking—pursuing what is actually true rather than what you wish were true. This is the cornerstone of the entire process, because without a commitment to seeing truth, you cannot identify mistakes or make proper corrections.

One of the main obstacles to this practice is the unwillingness to feel and look like a fool in the short term, and this may especially apply to you in those areas of life where you lead or have decision-making powers. So at times, you may feel jaded and fearful showing others that you are on a constant inquiry toward the truth. But without that mindset shift, you are not able to progress beyond a certain threshold. It starts from you.