When you make a mistake, thank your lucky stars

 
Conscious Incompetence is the action of doing something that you know that you cannot do properly, competently, or at all, for the purpose of learning or practicing how to do it better. It’s consciously and deliberately going out of your depth to learn how to swim well. In the process, you also let go of your pride and allow yourself to appear awkward, foolish, and sometimes stupid.

There are some provisos:

• Because you are choosing to do this, you naturally try to select times and places where you are not going to cause yourself — or others — real damage by making mistakes.
• When possible, you practice Conscious Incompetence away from the eyes of critics, especially bosses or jealous colleagues. This is, however, not always possible. Since your harshest critic is usually yourself, you have to be willing to put up with some internal carping and ignore it.
• You limit the risks by doing a little at a time, when you can. Little and often is a good guide.
• All episodes of Conscious Incompetence should be immediately followed up with time to reflect on what happened, what mistakes you made, and what you can learn from them. Conscious Incompetence is a learning process, so give yourself plenty of time to absorb the lessons.
• However badly you do, you don’t give up — at least until you have proved to yourself that the effort is truly not worth it. You are practicing, not trying to win a competition.

Seek out every chance to practice more

Every mistake is both a precious learning opportunity and a chance to do better. Make enough of them and you may even produce something truly important — just so long as you don’t lose heart, give up too soon, or ignore the lessons that mistake can teach you.

Why do star athletes practice so hard? Surely they can already outdo almost everyone?

Make as many mistakes as you can, but do it deliberately

When Roger Federer became the leading male tennis player in the world, he didn’t sit back and decide all he needed to do thereafter was repeat whatever he did in his last few games. Like all the other champions, he’s competing against himself at that level of [/tag]achievement[/tag]: against what he judges to be flaws in his performance, even if everyone else thinks he is amazing. By continual practice, outstanding sports players make more and more mistakes when it doesn’t matter and they can learn from what they have done. That way, when it comes to a competition, all that work will pay off in a better performance than they could have achieved otherwise.

That’s why I call this pattern”conscious incompetence.” Because it is deliberate: a conscious means of setting out to stretch yourself in ways that you know you can’t yet manage competently or easily — actions that mean deliberately taking risks and setting yourself up to make a slew of mistakes.

The result is a burst of learning chances, carefully arranged to happen in circumstances where the mistakes that you make won’t cause you insuperable problems. By focusing on what doesn’t work, you will learn how to be better. By taking known risks, you’ll discover new possibilities. By doing it with the conscious purpose of learning, you can choose your place and time and protect yourself, as much as possible, from any downside.

We all make mistakes, all the time. Mostly we do it when we don’t want to, in circumstances we would much rather avoid. That limits our learning, because the immediate response is always to try to claw your way back to stop the pain and embarrassment. The ideal circumstances for learning demand calmness and relaxation, not a huge burst of fear and anxiety.

Pride is your worst enemy

One last thought: if you’re too proud, or too concerned with preserving your own dignity and status, to be seen to make a fool of yourself, you’ll not be able to learn a thing.

People who can’t risk looking silly end up risking everything else instead. The arrogant can’t learn because they have to pretend they know it all already. Only the humble have the good sense to understand how little they know — and how much is still out there to be learned.

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