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Mistake While Making Mistakes

August 2021

THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

  • Not too meta
  • Who is the target audience
  • Deliver what you say you want to

How I Made a Mistake While Making Mistakes

Recalling my childhood, I never realized I was making mistakes because I was not aware of the concept.

Recalling back at the time, during 2003 using a new computer, the experience was all about clicking everywhere and seeing how and why things made sense.

However down the line, in 2016 I was stark paranoid about making mistakes. I used to hesitate to scribble on a white piece of paper or when I decided to learn a new coding language, I was full of fears, whether I was too late, would I blow up my system and as such.

Recalling back I ask,

Why Did I Hesitate to Make Mistakes?

It was because I had this fear of destroying something neat.

The laptop that I was learning on was a new one, all the files and folders were neatly organized inside it. I feared to make changes in it.

So Why Is There a Fear of Destroying Something Neat?

When starting a new venture, a clean, structured surrounding by its virtue attracts and demands perfect actions, which when starting out hinders the actions we take.

Because while starting out, the ideas are often rough, tangled and not thought through properly, which is in stark contrast to the perfect surrounding.

So How Did I Start Making Mistakes Again

I changed the way I thought about mistakes. I started seeing mistakes more as errors, more like the errors we get when we run programs.

I aimed to get errors. I aimed to start dirty, unorganized.

  • Like take a rough dirty page to flesh out raw ideas
  • Implement an idea for an application with bare minimum code
  • Work on code experiments in a cluttered folder

The idea is to get started as quickly and as dirty as possible.

Feedback

  • How to reduce mistakes over time
  • Counter argument
  • An example:
  • Divide into stages
    • Background
    • Reflection
    • Why the fear exists
  • How did you pull yourself back up
  • Supporting this
  • What is this want to instill in the reader
  • So understanding the audience