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Many of us fear mistakes more than we should. This is often because of several faulty (unconscious) assumptions:

Mistakes cause us to go backward.

Most mistakes are very costly.

In reality, many mistakes move us forward more than backward.

Conscientious people often experience a springboard effect following mistakes, whereby fixing the mistakes in their diligent style accelerates growth faster than if they'd never made any missteps.

For conscientious people, mistakes create momentum.

When We Perceive Mistakes as Setting Us Back, We're Often Wrong, but We Need Data to Prove It

If you're like me, you take more heed of advice you're able to prove to yourself in concrete ways. This article is about how you do that.

Build Your Own Evidence of the Momentum Mistakes Create

Keep a running log of mistakes that create more progression than regression. Capture the exact mechanism through which the mistake accelerates your improvement. That gives you your own evidence for the concept.

Knowing the specific ways mistakes can create forward progress can help you spot when that's happening. Knowing the mechanisms can also help you take full advantage of the opportunity that fixing a mistake provides.

Mechanisms that Create Forward Progress from Mistakes

There are a ton of ways this happens. Here are some.

1. You Find a Limit by........

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