The Mistake Picnic

Patrick Collison wants to spend hours going through every mistake in your book.

That's the story Michael Ovitz tells. He's at Stripe HQ - Collison's company. They grab lunch in the cafeteria, find a picnic table outside. Collison pulls out Ovitz's memoir 'Who Is Michael Ovitz?'. It's covered in Post-its.

"Ok, let's start.", Patrick says.

"Start what?"

"I've marked every place where you made a mistake. I want to know the conditions you were under. What you might have done differently. And what would have happened if you had."

Ovitz asks why.

"So I can try and avoid them."

They spent the next three hours on every note.

Yeah, I know, this is a riff about two hyper-successful white dudes in California. Fnargh.

But, there's something unfashionable - and interesting - about it.

There's a whole culture around "embrace failure" and "fail fast" and "mistakes are how we learn."

It's not wrong.

But the idea that you might actually study someone else's errors, carefully, so you make fewer of your own?

That's not celebrated. It probably should be.

Making mistakes is both underrated and overrated.

You're going to make them - so it's worth getting comfortable with that.

But it's painful. Failure hurts. Given the choice, you'd rather skip a few.

Two things can be true at the same time.