Mistakes

[Chaos Symphony]

Here's something I've been wondering about. How do we handle mistakes?

Everybody makes them at some point. How does it affect you, to find out that you've been in error? What are the kinds of mistakes you most hate to make? There are social blunders, definitely. And then there are matters of intellectual competence. Have you ever been wrong about the truth, perhaps a belief you've acted on? How do you handle it when you find out?

Being wrong may be inevitable, but there's nothing I hate more than that feeling of foolishness. Do you find it easy to get past this? Or does it continue to haunt you for a long while, sneering at you in your mind? I'm curious to see whether there's any prevalent attitude on the matter among INTPs and others.

[int]

It depends. I've fscked up pretty big but can still stand my ground on those mistakes. I've let small mistakes that no one noticed haunt me at night.

Making emotional decisions and emotional outbursts are usually the cause of my foolishness. And I hate how it haunts me. Stupid little things will wake me up at night. :angry:

[SheepDog]

I make my biggest mistakes when I let my ego get in the way of my judgement. Those mistakes are the ones that haunt my ego most. A vicious circle.

[Serotonin]

I read on a website that the thought "I should have known better" haunts the INTP for life.... never a truer sentence has been spoken.

[Vagabond]

It depends. I've fscked up pretty big but can still stand my ground on those mistakes. I've let small mistakes that no one noticed haunt me at night.

Making emotional decisions and emotional outbursts are usually the cause of my foolishness. And I hate how it haunts me. Stupid little things will wake me up at night. :angry: Oh yeah.

[mgb]

I find a lot of mistakes that I have made in the past were really just bad choices. For some reason lately I have been trying to stop making a lot of those bad choices. As far as little mistakes, like getting something wrong on a test, I just look at them as a learning experience.

I really like the Radiohead song Just. "You do it to yourself, and that's what really hurts."

[hemanthraz]

usually i know when im going to make a mistake, but continue anyway coz i think itll work because IM doing it.
Numerous hard-hitting experiences later i have learnt to think an action through before execution.But still when it comes to relationships, hehe....
Im good at analyzing what went wrong and why tough. I can think of all sorts of alternatives afterwards.So the **dwell part is totally me.

[Dunearhp]

I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.

[Avengardh]

I usually don't make mistakes (no, I didn't vote for the last one), mainly because I take my time and rationalize before doing anything (fast thinking...I don't think about every little thing); but when I do, 80% of the time it's "oops...oh well, tomorrow is another day" and 20% of the time it's "god damn it...should have done that instead of that...oh well."

~*Aven*~

[Boneca]

I think mistakes are okay as long as I have an excuse, such as being new in the field or being extremely tired. If I do something wrong when I'm fully rested and have enough experience with what I'm doing, then it annoys me very much.
The absolute worst thing I can imagine is when I use some facts to support an argument, and it turns out that I remembered the facts incorrectly. That, and being guilty of using poor logic, are the things that make me want to go and hide somewhere.

[Johnny]

I take mistakes really hard...LOL

[ohnoaninfp]

Oops oh well. I make mistakes all of the time, so I have gotten used to the fact that I am a fuck up.

[evil kitten]

I hate making huge mistakes it makes me feel like a failure.

[jimkopelli]

I usually just deal with it. I might get pissed off for a minute, but that's just because it's more work to fix it. If it's a big lifechanging mistake... yeah, those get dwelt on. I still give myself crap for things I screwed up years ago.

[SheepDog]

When I make a mistake, I have to remind myself to stop thinking about it. Rehearsing the mistake (i.e. thinking about it over and over) only makes the memory stronger and more persistent. I make myself think of something else when I start to do that so I can eventually forget it. It seems to help.

[Solo]

I really hate making mistakes. They haunt me for a long time. It seems like all my memories are of my mistakes. I remember an entire chess game I lost a year ago. It was all because of one stupid mistake.

It's little things like that I really hate. I never make huge mistakes that are noticed by others. Sometimes I think my high standards for myself when I was younger were a mistake(that thought keeps me up for hours) because I never want to fail and any little mistake seems like failure.

[Nighthawk]

Big mistakes haunt me for life. The unit I served with in the first gulf war accidentally killed an American soldier when we mistakenly attacked a squad of engineers we thought were enemy. Although it was 2am, pitch black, and I didn't pull the trigger ... I still haven't come to terms with the kid's death almost 14 years later. I keep replaying it in my head every single day, trying to figure out if there was something I could have done to prevent it.

[Dman]

I think mistakes are okay as long as I have an excuse, such as being new in the field or being extremely tired. If I do something wrong when I'm fully rested and have enough experience with what I'm doing, then it annoys me very much.
The absolute worst thing I can imagine is when I use some facts to support an argument, and it turns out that I remembered the facts incorrectly. That, and being guilty of using poor logic, are the things that make me want to go and hide somewhere.

Hit the nail on the head.

I internalize and analyze just about everything to death, so it usually takes me a while to make a confident decision. Even then, I may be on the fence about it. However, going through business school and working in business you are taught to make quick, confident decisions. Just about everytime I try to do this I end up wrong. I feel like an idiot, pretending to be confident about an answer, then ending up wrong. It drives me nucking futs. Another drawback in attempting to "sell out" to the extroverted world.

[Nighthawk]

Hit the nail on the head.

However, going through business school and working in business you are taught to make quick, confident decisions. Just about everytime I try to do this I end up wrong. I feel like an idiot, pretending to be confident about an answer, then ending up wrong.

That reminds me so much of the military. Lots of quick, sharp, confident answers ... most of which are not thought out completely or outright wrong.



Another drawback in attempting to "sell out" to the extroverted world.

I hate this one too. I always feel like a sellout when I feign mock enthusiasm to "get with the program" and be a "team player."

[Jkrs]

I make too many mistakes to let them bother me that much. 'Ah well, another time' seems to be the prevailing philosophy.

[Jezebel]

Dwelling on it depends on how big the mistake is, but I usually at least try to go back and analyze what I did wrong so it doesn't happen again.

[null-tE]

If i can rationalize why I made the mistake, then it doesnt bother me in the slightest. If i can not, i get very agitated and frustrated.

[MasterMerk]

I'm a perfectionist, and tend to beat myself up for little mistakes. For instance, yesterday I mixed up where the rectum and the anus "goes" on a digestive system diagram, and it cost me 1st place in an assignment. Boy did I kick my own ass for that in an ironic fashion.

It's inevitable, really.

[QrioCT]

"don't cry over spilled milk. [just wipe it up. and dont do it again.]"

[matthew0028]

I've let small mistakes that no one noticed haunt me at night.

I used to be like that. As a kid, I used to beat myself up (mentally, of course) for dropping something while onstage in kindergarden. And this was several years later.

Eventually (I think towards the end of gradeschool), I realized I was wasting energy worrying about things like that, and rationalized them away by saying "I'm almost certainly the only one who remembers that, therefore it doesn't matter." Surprisingly enough, that worked, more or less. The mistakes still bothered me, but I was able to get over them using the sheer power of Reason(TM).

Anyway, as I got older (highschool age), my mistakes stopped bothering me altogether. I think it was a combination of constantly using my previous tricks, and the fact that I had always been so accident-prone, and made so many minor mistakes, that I just got used to the fact that I was going to do stupid stuff by virtue of being me. So, I learned to accept the fact that I was living with (or as) a total klutz, and I might as well accept that and not worry about it (why worry about what you can't change, eh?)

Oh, yes, quick side note. When I say I was accident prone, I ain't kidding. I couldn't possibly count the number of times in high school I dropped my expensive graphing calculator, often down flights of stairs. In fact, I got voted the most accident prone guy in my senior class, and that was out of a class of about 300 (I think; could've been less--in any event, it wasn't a super-small class).

In other words, I totally understand:

Oops oh well. I make mistakes all of the time, so I have gotten used to the fact that I am a fuck up.

Actually, my philosophy has changed to be "Worrying doesn't help any, and it drains energy, so why worry?" Of course, this philosophy does have its downsides, and is probably part of the reason I failed out of college m junior year. I mean, some level of worrying may have prevented me from letting myself not do homework, and not attending classes for weeks straight (at which point there isn't much point in returning to class). Of course, at that point in my life, I was basically "forgetting" about my problems for periods of time, and then getting all depressed when I remembered my situation, then "forgetting" again so I could cope.

Okay, so, man am I glad those days are long over, and that I'm doing relatively successfully now that I've returned to college.

...okay, at what point did I decide to stop talking about...whatever the topic was again...and start talking about my dysfunctional college career?

*shrug*

Well, I've said it, and there's no way of taking it back now. Well, except by not posting this, or by going back and editing this post... Yup, no way of taking any of it back now... :whistle:

[hugin]

Foolish is he who frets at night,
And lies awake to worry'
A weary man when morning comes,
He finds all as bad as before.
-- Håvamål

'Oops, oh well." <-- seems to be a motto of mine.

[Birdsnest]

I voted "oops, oh well". Because people are supposed to forgive, and you are too, so forgiveness and something learned is really how I get over it.

I think of mistakes as part of learning and natural. Usually, I feel a little bad about it, if it caused a large problem. But then, I sort of tally it up to not doing it that way again, and find out how I should do it differently. I tell myself, 'hey, I can't help it if someone didn't take the time to tell me that'. Why wasn't I ever "trained" in that?

Anyway, I do make plenty of mistakes, "socially", at work I'm very thorough perfectionist and don't make very many. I am not bothered for the most part, because I don't see them as personal. I see them as spiritual, and i know I would do it right if I had known how. Mistakes are almost like medicine in a way if you learn from them. Anecdotal medicine that you have to take even if it tastes bad, you need to totally absorb and learn and feel the pain and get over it and do the next thing on your list and move on.

I do invite open criticism, especially if its contructive criticism, I actually like feed back if it helps me do whats right, because I know I am lacking in some areas, I surely don't feel like I am perfect.

[coffeezombie]

Usually I don't dwell on mistakes I make, but instead do everything I can to try to fix that particular mistake and make it right. But if it's one of those mistakes that one can't really fix, then it falls into the "Oh well" category. I think I'm pretty good at not dwelling on the past and instead worrying about the future. lol

[Kattia]

Two responses:

Rational-mind: "That's cool. Mistake are simply a part of the learning process. The goal is growth, and growth can only be achieved through risk. Making mistakes is an inherent, expected and even desirable part of the process."

Emotional-mind (aka The Perfectionist): "What was I thinking?!?!? Absolutely unacceptable. I'm smarter than that. "

[Edmond Zedo]

Zedo mind: "Screw you guys. I'm going hooome."

[Miss Anthropic]

I used to be a dweller, especially when I was a kid--every little thing burned into my brain. Today I am working really hard to not be that way. I recently had an experience where my *mistake* meant the difference between $25,000 and $50,000. :banghead: I allowed a certain amount of self-commiseration time then I......let it go.....
That particular experience changed my perspective on mistakes large and small. I'm much kinder to myself these days.