Mistakes will appear in everything we do. So success isn’t about the elimination of mistakes – it’s about understanding the likelihood of mistakes occurring.
With any pursuit or activity, try to determine a baseline for failures or errors. If it’s an activity you want to sustain, track your performance over a period of time. If the activity is more once-off in nature or trial-and-error is costly, then try to estimate the potential risk factors before taking action.
Doing so will help you determine a baseline, which you can then use to measure your subsequent performance and take considered steps to improve it.
You can also compare your baseline to others. As an example, if you’re playing basketball and striving to hit every free throw in a game, it’s helpful to realise that an amazing free throw percentage in the NBA is 90%.
But most importantly, this will help you determine whether a particular mistake was within an acceptable or expected range. This means that if something goes wrong but your baseline accounted for it, then you shouldn’t beat yourself up that it happened.
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