5 Mistakes to Learn From
A reflection on personal development
What comes to your mind when hearing the word anti-fragile?
My answer to that question is “something that doesn’t break that easily”. That is in part correct. However, a better way to understand this is by thinking of glass and rubber.
If a glass falls to the floor, even without you throwing it intentionally, it’s likely to break. Instead, if you through a rubber ball with all your strength, something interesting will happen: it will bounce back.
Anti-fragility is not only about bearing hard situations; it is about learning from them, and coming out stronger.
This doesn’t mean that you won’t fail. In fact, the way I see it, failure is actually the secret ingredient here. Some say that if you never know failure, you will never know success. Some others frame it as either winning or learning.
Without further ado, here are the 5 failures that I’ve had so far in 2021, what I learned from them, and how I plan to bounce back.
Special thanks to Michael Raspuzzi for encouraging me to write this article and introducing me to anti-fragility :)
1. Checking boxes
From my experience, in this standardized and modern world, it’s easier to let go by other’s opinions, what society thinks you need to get done as a student, a woman, or simply for being a human.
In this modern world, every personal development “guru” talks about this as well. What I’m here to talk about are the specific to-do lists that we follow without seeking understanding of them.
Let’s take school as our best example. Passed grade 9th? Check. Wrote essays? Check. Got an A in all my classes? Check!
That’s definitely a problem. However, I think that checking boxes can turn into an even bigger problem: doing that with things that are supposed to make you grow; with things that you’re supposed to enjoy and learn from.
Okay, so school should also fit into that box, but let’s take another example: personal projects and personal development.
The way this specifically happened to me, was when I was working on some biotech projects at the human accelerator called The Knowledge Society (TKS). There, ambitious teenagers can learn about exponential tech and prepare to be world-class leaders.
Anyways, the point is that one can work on a variety of different exponential technologies and by the end have an actual green check on our portfolios that honestly, looks awesome.
But of course that isn’t the goal of TKS. The goal is that you go deep into these technologies and learn as much as you can, in a short period of time, AND at the same time you explore what you like.
That’s, I think, what I’ve found challenging: to find the line between exploring and checking boxes.
What I’ve learned by reflecting, is that these don’t have to be separate things. Both with school and life, you can have your checks and done the process well by learning something new, or just have those checks for the sake of having them.
The key metric is answering “yes” to the question: have you learned something new?
2. Not seeking understanding
Let’s seek understanding about seeking understanding: meta-seeking-understanding?! 👀🤯
Seeking understanding refers to turning information (which could be random) into knowledge (wisdom, critical thinking). In simple words, and putting it in a pragmatic way: it’s about questioning what you know about the world, yourself, what people tell you, and everything in between.
Furthermore, seeking understanding is going from a passive state in which you blindly believe in information, to getting to the root cause of things by asking why, why, why, why, why, and why; lots of times.
This totally goes attached to the “checking boxes problem”. If you don’t know what you’re intention behind doing things is, you will just be following what you think it’s right, without actually acquiring any new knowledge.
On my end, this happened with the personal development content that I consume. These days people tell you to listen to podcasts, read certain books, read certain articles or watch certain videos, because of the value that they can give you.
Even within TKS, there is another accelerator for this willing to 100x their growth. Every week, we receive some curated content to consume, with the purpose of helping us grow.
In order to keep this community legit, consuming this content was a requirement to continue being part. Now, I want to clarify that the problem isn’t that. It isn’t external to myself, but rather internal.
What I got wrong is not seeing beyond those “requirements”. This is were problem #1, and seeking understanding converge. If I was constantly seeking understanding about what I did, I would take more value out of those things.
3. Doing things that don’t make sense
It seems like we’re going deeper and deeper into which could be the root cause of a problem, though I haven’t revealed the problem yet.
You already know what my next mistake was: doing things that don’t make sense. I experienced this by procrastinating, sleeping late, not organizing, postponing important things, and similar things.
From my perspective, the antonym of these actions is being intentional. This is one of the most important mindsets in my opinion. When you are intentional, you have a clear goal in mind: an intention, as the name suggests.
In other words, you know what you want and what it will take to get there, and you also understand the purpose behind it. If you aren’t checking boxes, you’re seeking understanding, and if you understand what you’re doing you also know what you shouldn’t or what you don’t have to do.
I want to be an entrepreneur in the biotechnology field. Being an entrepreneur is probably one of the busiest jobs that one can have. This means that I have to be really intentional about how I spend my time.
Working in the biotech/healthcare field, what makes the most sense is taking care of my health: sleeping and eating well, and doing physical exercise are key.
4. Forgetting about my mission and vision
We could keep on seeking understanding about why we check boxes, why we don’t seek understanding and why we aren’t intentional. However, up to a certain extent, I believe that it all boils down to knowing your mission and vision in life very well.
I know this may be hard, since there are a lot of us, especially teenagers who are just starting to discover who we are. So how are we supposed to know what we want to do during the next decades of our lives?!
From my experience, you don’t need to know that you want to “cure cancer by using base editing to correct the p51 mutation”. However, I highly suggest that you know who you want to be, as a person.
Do you want to be ambitious, kind, hard-working, caring? Whatever that may be, just make sure you’re being authentic (AKA: be you! ;))
I believe that it’s how we react to external factors, that we can forget about our mission/vision, or forget about who we are. Enter the world of stoicism: bad situations can happen, and sometimes the only thing that you can control is how you react to them.
As a good friend called Izzy would say: are you gonna let somebody else control your cardiac rhythm and hormones? Seeing emotions from that perspective really blew up my mind.
Coming back to the problem, a good mission/vision is going to wake you up in the morning, give you hope in the tough times, and more boost in the good times as well. If you forget about it, you could get lost.
I was experiencing a greater workload than I’d done before when I also forgot about my mission. I started to feel impostor syndrome, not knowing what was it all for (the work that I was doing every day), and not even knowing why I woke up every morning.
I know all of this could sound extremely cheesy. I’m honestly just talking about my experience. You can wake up in the morning without a mission, but I guarantee you that it won’t feel the same at all.
Even more important, I think, is updating your goals according to your progress, always keeping in mind the vision. According to the business point of view, the vision should never change, and the mission can change in the middle to the long term.
As I was saying, it’s challenging to even know who you want to be as a teenager or as a young person. Since the mission is more goal-focused, it could be even harder. Therefore, my advice is to explore: explore who you want to be, and you’ll know your vision. Explore what you want to do, and keep exploring. You’ll have different missions, and that’s okay.
5. Lying to myself
I don’t think this is a problem that is the root of the previous ones, but it’s rather kind of a bonus. I was having all of those problems, and I wasn’t noticing because a) My bar was low and b) I was not being true to myself.
It’s easy to get out of your comfort zone, then find another comfort zone and not get out of that one because you’ve already accomplished what you wanted. That’s why your vision is so important. You may accomplish mission after mission, but if your vision tells you to keep on going, you should: seek discomfort is another mindset to keep in mind for this.
In this sense, I would say that problem #5 can come from staying in your new comfort zone, and telling yourself that you’re “living the life that you wanted”. That’s literally what I was telling myself, like “this is wonderful, I’m accomplishing the goals that I set for myself 1 year ago”.
Well, guess what? Those goals have expired, and if your vision is to continue being ambitious, creative and bold, you should get out of your comfort zone once more.
You know what they say: success is not a destiny, but a journey.
But in the end…
When I started writing this reflection article, I hadn’t realized that these 5 problems would be kind of the root cause of one and other. Now, if I don’t want to have another problem, I need to get practicing these right now, which is linked to my final piece of advice: have bias to action!
You’ve read this article, but don’t only check that box!
Why did you read this article? Seek understanding!
Wanna reflect on it a little bit more? Be intentional!
Wanna go deeper? Understand your mission and vision, and don’t forget about them!
Done? Go do it!
