Words. Ideas. Actions.

11 January 2023

I haven’t fully thought this through yet, so I can’t promise a revelation by the end. While listening to The Light We Carry, Michelle Obama shared her version of advice I’ve tried to accept for years: Don’t fear mistakes because you can learn from them. If I had a quarter for every time I’ve ever tried to put this into practice, I would have been able to buy Twitter myself. 

We’ve been led to believe that a broken bone will be stronger in that place when it heals. And it’s this misconception that, I think, helps fuel the idea that we get better after learning from our mistakes. My worry, however, has always been what are the greater ramifications of making that initial mistake? 

Obviously, there are some jobs where a mistake at work can be much more costly than others. Giving the wrong entrée to a guest at dinner service is not as dire as, say, amputating the wrong leg. And this kind of thinking has always pushed me to avoid mistakes in the first place. Now, that’s not to say I’ve never made them. But boy do I hate it when I do. And I tend to get down on myself for not doing better. 

One way I’ve been exploring changing this is by admiring the art of Kintsugi, the art of fixing broken pottery by piecing the broken pieces back together and binding them with gold. Instead of trying to seamlessly glue them back together, you accentuate the fact that the original has been fundamentally changed, and potentially become more valuable, by adding a precious metal to it. This highlighting of where something went wrong is such a fascinating idea to me, yet I can’t stop thinking about how they could have prevented the pottery from getting broken in the first place. 

I’m not sure I’ll ever get comfortable with the idea. Especially when I think back on my work at Twitter, where making a mistake could have terrible, global consequences. It was a burden I carried each and every day. But I felt like I had been training my entire life to make the right decision the first time, rather than having to go back and undo any damage done. How much gold do you think it would take to put Vine back together, anyhow?

Unfortunately, the biggest side effect of this kind of thinking is that because I expect so much from myself, I tend to have similar high expectations in others. And when you’re raising a child, that kind of thinking comes into conflict daily. Or, more likely, hourly. But parenting travails wasn’t where I wanted to go tonight; I can save that for a future post.

See you tomorrow?

21 December 2022

Tonight is the Winter Solstice. And I feel like it’s making me a little more reflective. I had a pretty big win at work today, the end of my Xmas shopping seems attainable, and things at home are as quiet as hosting an impromptu sleepover can be. Overall, not a bad day. 

Yet, I still find myself falling into a long-held habit: self criticism. 

See, I’ve always been one to set high standards for myself. I think most of us do. But where it becomes problematic for me is the way my own reviews sometimes impede me from getting anything done, worrying that I’ll fall short of some self-imposed metric. It happens a lot. I’ve even written about it before. And because I’m still talking about it tonight, it’s obvious that I haven’t found a good solution yet. Let’s look at an example. Other than that life-changing moment I think I’ve already pretty thoroughly explored. 

Hold on a minute … As I am going through any and all of the times I’ve judged myself coming up short, I feel like I am just recreating the pattern that I came here to complain about in the first place. And I am trying to break that cycle, right? Is refusing to talk about a specific example me making progress? And should I let my therapist know about this breakthrough and that I don’t need tomorrow’s session? Probably not.

See, I think it just comes down to a fear of making mistakes. I know we learn a great deal more from them than almost any other method. But I’m so reluctant to try and fail that I give up before risking coming up short. Short of my own expectations. These posts, honestly, are a little bit of an exercise in trying to get better at trying and failing and trying again. I mean, if you’ve read even a handful of these Not Tweets posts, you know some are much better than others. But my hope is that practice makes perfect. After all, I’m still looking for perfect. 

See you tomorrow?