11 Reasons Why We Make Mistakes (and why we keep making them!) Part One

By Mike Mahler

To err is human, and that will never change; however, not taking time to understand the underlying reasons mistakes are made and therefore, continuing to err, is simple ignorance. Humans can do better than this, and it all begins with honest self-assessment and self-analysis.  Becoming a student of human consciousness--specifically your own--is critical in understanding what motivates erroneous behaviors and how to transcend them.  

The book Why We Make Mistakes, by Joseph T. Hallinan, provides an excellent starting point. Hallinan details the reasons people make mistakes and why most never learn from them.  For example, people get divorced from one spouse only to remarry someone else of a similar nature, only to get divorced again, etc.  This same scenario replays itself in business as people move from one failed business venture to the next, always wondering why they keep missing the target.  In the realm of nutrition, people again and again repeat the same weight-loss diets, though they never achieve their long-term goals.  These habitual frustrations create a general attitude of apprehension--a malaise--compounded by the tendency to avoid taking action altogether--which is also a mistake.

Hallinan’s book gives eleven reasons why we make the mistakes we make--then continue repeating these same mistakes. Some of these reasons may seem trivial, while others will resonate more deeply. While you may relate to some--if not all--of the eleven reasons we make mistakes, you'll certainly find them interesting.

Let's get started on why so many of us have bought one-way tickets to the land of mistake and regret--and what we can do to make a mid-course correction.

The first reason for mistakes is taking more responsibility for a mistaken action than for taking no action at all. In other words, if you try to make something positive happen and it backfires, you'll take this badly, which creates--and reinforces--a reluctance to take further action. If instead, you do nothing (and as a result miss out on the same positive opportunity) you won't take this lack of action nearly as badly as the failed pro-action...thus entire lives are lived with negligible growth.  

I experienced this myself when my first business venture turned out poorly.  I'd worked my tail off for nearly two years without gaining any forward momentum.  Worse, I was worse off than I'd started out.  By the time the business officially failed, I was thousands of dollars in debt and to financially recover, I had to take a job working for someone else.  What I'd wanted more than anything was to make it as an entrepreneur, so having to take a regular job for wages left me feeling bad, and I wondered if  the entire experience hadn't been a waste of time.  Yet to assume my sincere efforts had amounted nothing (that is, that this was the end of the story) would only have been pessimistic and myopic--and I am neither.

In the process of trying to create a successful business, I'd developed several useful skill sets, specifically, I saw what I was capable of when I was driven by a strong belief in what I was doing, which manifested in a tireless work ethic. It was at this time I also developed my public speaking skills, which have proven invaluable in my current chosen work.  As a result, I was no longer afraid of speaking in front of groups (and actually became damn good at it) and I'd also acquired that elusive skill of effective interpersonal communication. 

In spite of these worthwhile gains in both skills and experience, I was extremely reluctant to launch another business.  The pain of the previous failure had made a home in my head and it took some time to evict it.  In fact, it took becoming completely disgusted with working for others, in a series meaningless jobs, before I fully committed to my fitness business. 

What I learned in the process of my first business failure has paid dividends in the success of my second, current vocation. In the eight years since I started my fitness business, it was cash-flow positive within the first year and three years in I'd realized a fair income, which I've sustained up to the present time

While the role of devil’s advocate can be useful in making important life decisions, conditioned apprehension results in a life lacking those deeper--and thus more meaningful--levels of experience, including the experience of joy.  Making a big mistake isn't remedied by never again attempting anything new and original. Taking  calculated risks is the price of living fully.  Living life on the bench is secure--maybe even injury-proof--but devoid of any dynamism and contact, which is the essence of living life aggressively.

The second reason for most mistakes is giving too much weight to our initial instincts.  We're told by teachers and authorities to trust our initial instincts and tend to selectively remember those times when it works in our favor, rather than all those other times our initial instincts miserably failed us.  In reality, our initial instincts are mostly erroneous and worse, is our after-the-fact tendency to falsely remember instincts or intuitions that were never there!  In other words, once we already know the outcome, we like to think we knew it all along. 

According to Hallinan, first instincts are generally wrong, and studies of test takers have shown that people who go back and change their initial answers often achieve higher scores.  Many people won't risk changing their initial test answers--even if they're uncertain of the correct answer--because they have a greater fear of actively marking a wrong answer then of missing through their ambivalence, a more passive form of error-by-default in contrast to the former active, willful error.  Once again, this demonstrates the difference between mistakes committed by default and clinging to the known, rather than mistakes caused by direct action taken in the effort to do something right.

The third reason we make mistakes stems from our tendency to look back more favorably upon our past actions than they actually merit.  Like proud parents, we delight in boasting of how well our younger selves performed certain tasks--which may in fact have been average at best. 

This reminds me of when I presented a lecture on optimizing hormones at my Collision Course seminar (Las Vegas 2008.)  In my memory, I saw myself as intense and riveting as Al Pacino's character in the movie Heat (and if you haven’t seen Heat, immediately stop reading this page and go watch it!)  Since my brother filmed the seminar, I was able to compare my subjective memory with the objective evidence on video and, to my disappointment, my memory was not calibrated with reality.  Not that I did a poor job, it's just that in my own mind at the time, I thought it was exceptional, not just pretty good.  According to Hallinan, being well-calibrated is when our self-perception closely matches the objective reality our self.  The truth?  The mind's version of our selves is rarely well-calibrated with the self we present to the world. Short of enlisting a personal film crew to witness our personality in action, this can be difficult to face without flinching or self-censor.  In your effort to calibrate internal memory with external reality, a more practical alternative to a personal film crew is requesting honest, constructive feedback from trusted sources.

The number four reason we make mistakes can be traced to that cliché so many of have internalized: hindsight is 20/20.  In reality, hindsight--like memory--is fantasy-based, thus an inaccurate account of past events.  Psychologists call this phenomenon: hindsight bias.  This is how it works:   Once we already know how events have played out, we tend to change our pre-event memories.   I've personally experienced this more times than I care to admit with the most prominent event being the tragedy of Dr. Bruce Nadler.

In 2007 I spoke at the Fitness Business Summit, where Dr. Nadler was also presenting.  I'd read many of his articles and seen him on Howard Stern and was looking forward to meeting him.  He seemed like a really nice guy, excited about entering the fitness business with a new personal training studio in Los Angeles.  After my presentation on Internet marketing, Bruce made a point of shaking my hand and congratulated me on a superb job.  His wife, who seemed very kind, made a point of complimenting my wife, Carol, about me.

Well, fast-forward one year later and Dr. Nadler is making news for murdering his wife and committing suicide.  It seems he'd been depressed over losing his medical license, his fitness business wasn't going so well and...certainly there's more to such a desperate act than we'll ever know.  Yet, after I heard the story, my memory recalled Dr. Nadler looking depressed at the Summit.  I now remembered walking past the table where he was eating lunch and him appearing noticeably miserable. Interestingly, this memory only surfaced after learning of the murder/suicide--in other words, I invented a memory based upon a known outcome.  In fact I had no insight before the tragedy, and when the story broke I was just as shocked as everyone else.

The fifth reason we make mistakes?  The myth of multi-tasking.  You may have heard that in order to be successful you'll need to be good at multi-tasking, well, nothing is further from the truth!  Multi-tasking is instead an excellent way of doing several things poorly or--worse--a way to completely fail in several efforts at once.  Hallinan claims...We never make two conscious decisions at the same time no matter how simple they are.  In other words, it's impossible to do multiple, conscious tasks at once and what we're actually doing is jumping back and forth between disparate tasks rather than effectively working tasks simultaneously.  

My own experience is that it's virtually impossible for me to write articles if I have Internet access.  Going online is a facile distraction when what I really need is absolute focus on my writing.  I frequently disconnect the Internet or go to a coffee house, where I can't get Internet access on my laptop.  If I don't block myself from the Internet, I'll typically to stop every 10 minutes or so to check email, or research something or other on the web.  Every time I lose concentration it takes me awhile to refocus and resume writing.  I've found it's far more efficient to concentrate an hour or so upon writing, then take a break and check emails, rather than continuously switching back and forth.

When it comes to the unconscious mind, on the other hand, it's quite possible to work multiple tasks at the same time, for example, I can lift weights while listening to music.  Lifting weights is a conscious activity, while listening to music (at least in this context) is unconscious.  But what if I tried to do my workout, listen to music, and train a client at the same time?  At best, I'd get a mediocre workout, and my client as well.  I'd risk potential injury, due to lack of attention or even worse, my client could get injured.  Far better for both of us if I concentrate on training the client, then training myself.

Another example is something we do every day--driving.  We can all drive our cars while listening to music; driving is a conscious activity, while listening to music is unconscious.  However, driving a car while talking on a mobile phone is a potential disaster.  When you're engaged in phone conversation you’re not paying full attention to driving and if something happens on the road requiring an immediate reaction, you’re going to miss it.  I once saw a guy driving against traffic while talking on a cell phone, and he didn't stop driving the wrong way, even with traffic coming right at him.  Cars in the correct lanes (going the opposite direction) had to drive around him to avoid a head-on collision.  This insanity continued for several blocks before he finally realized he was on the wrong side of the road.  On top of all this, in his delusion that he was right (and everyone else wrong) he'd been honking his horn at the oncoming traffic--so much for multi-tasking!  While you may be able to jump back and forth between multiple conscious tasks, you'll neither save yourself time nor be efficient and effective at any of it.  Focus on a single conscious task at a time and do it well, then move on to the next task.

Next time we will pick up with six more reasons why we make mistakes. 

To be continued

 

***Article Edited by Teresa Blazey: teresa.blazey@gmail.com