TED Talks on the Importance of Failure and Mistakes

Learning about the value of mistakes, I stayed up until early morning (2.37am. as I write) watching TED Talks. This in itself is a mistake in some ways, considering how tired I will be tomorrow but what I have learned will have such a positive outcome, hopefully it will outweigh any negative consequences. This is a somewhat subjective measurement of the situation which may be more about justification than an accurate account of my actions.

I watched and listened and waited for new ideas and inspiration, reinforcement  of learning and reassurement and on top of that some new challenge and knowledge and understanding. I wanted and got it all.

Now I will not compound my mistake by staying up later to finish this piece. That constant battle with myself (or my monkey according to some therapist I saw on TV). This balancing act I perform. This constant struggle to do the right thing. The neat mind-ledger of life with + & - and the balance where I don't owe or am indebted to anyone or feel like I forgot something or got it wrong. Where everything is a tidy column of nicely written balanced figures and letters, expressing the equally measured karma to come my way. Rather than the crumpled up, illegiblly written post it note, lost in the tower of post it notes with more illegible lists which I will never get round to not least because I can't read my own writing.

It's 3 am. I press Save, thinking how these posts are trying to be some interpretation and re-organization of the metaphorical tower of crumpled illegible post it notes. These blog posts are the nearest I will come to the organizational and analytical equivalent of a spreadsheet.

Ted Talks about the value, joy and necessity of making mistakes:

The writer of Eat , Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert gives an inspiring talk on finding your way home from the disorientation of the being thrown off balance by either success or failure: Success, Failure and the Drive to Keep Creating 

Kathryn Schulz, a writer from the New Yorker says Don't Regret Regret and tells us to embrace our wrongness in On Being Wrong.

Tim Harford, the Undercover Economist stills about the value of trial and error for success and, he asks us to make better mistakes in Trial and Error and the God Complex.

Diana Laufenberg, a school teacher,  in How to Learn? From Mistakes, talks about the idea of that school isn't today necessarily where people get their information and how the projects she has worked on with students havce found more to learn from in the mistakes than in the perfectly executed, using the formula 'fail, procees, learn from'. She is an advocate of 'experiential learning and empowering student voice and embracing failure' which does not come about with standardised tests or a 'culture of one right answer'.