Other People’s Mistakes

One of the things I frequently advocate for is making more mistakes. This advice, like most of the advice I give, is inward-facing; this is, after all, a blog about personal development and self-improvement more than anything else. You should make more mistakes because it’s better for you to do so – your general level of output for whatever you’re trying to accomplish, from learning the piano to finding true love, will be higher if you make (and learn from) mistakes instead of being so risk-averse you never make any.

But today, we’re going to talk a little bit about other people’s mistakes. And how you should react to them. It’s going to be the exact same advice, just viewed from the outside. So let me tell you the story of two delivery drivers, Amy and Jane.

Amy and Jane both work for the same delivery company, but Amy is far more profitable. She’s constantly improving on her job – everything from how she packs her vehicles to the routes she takes around the city. She’s always trying to do better. She’s worth $10K in profit per month to the company. Jane is profitable too, but only to the tune of $5K per month; she’s a bit more conservative in her approach and doesn’t step out of her comfort zone much.

One day, Amy makes a mistake at work. She damages an item as part of her delivery, and the customer who receives it files the standard form that entitles them to have the delivery company replace it at their cost. This is a $100 mistake, though it wasn’t because of any special carelessness on Amy’s part. It was just a thing that happens because humans are fallible, though Amy’s boss notices that Amy’s truck isn’t packed according to the standard method and calls Amy into his office.

In his office, the manager tells Amy that he’ll be deducting the $100 from Amy’s paycheck. It was, after all, her mistake.

Amy considers this in silence for a moment. While the mistake wasn’t due to carelessness, there is some chance that her innovative packing techniques led to the damage. She takes responsibility and says so: “Okay, boss, I got it. You can take the $100 out of my last paycheck. I quit.”

The boss is flabbergasted. He wants to know why Amy is quitting over something so small.

“That’s the point,” she says. “I’m very profitable. In fact, I’m more profitable than any other delivery driver here, though we all get paid the same amount. I’m more profitable because I’ve chosen to improve my skill by making mistakes; sometimes I had to work later to finish my deliveries because I tried a route that wasn’t quicker. Sometimes I had to work harder to repack my truck several times because the first configuration I tried didn’t improve my storage capacity. But I owned those mistakes and finished my route. And as a result, I got better and better until now I can deliver twice as much as anyone else in here. On average, a driver like Jane makes five thousand in profit for you a month, while I make ten thousand. You could have just been content to let me make you nine thousand, nine hundred in profit and been happy that I’m such a great delivery driver. But instead, you’re trying to put the cost of this mistake back on me without ever sharing with me the benefit of those mistakes. So now I’m taking that benefit with me when I go. I could work for a competitor, start my own delivery service, or even just find a new industry to learn. And you just paid thousands of dollars a month for a hundred-dollar bill.”

The lesson is a good one – mistakes aren’t just a cost of doing business. They’re what makes the business run in the first place. Often in a workplace you can hear a water-cooler complaint like ‘Jensen makes a ton of mistakes, but because he’s number one in sales they let him get away with it.’ The complainer has missed the point. ‘Jensen’ isn’t being given special treatment because of his high performance. Jensen’s manager just understands that the occasional mistake is an essential part of what makes that performance excellent in the first place. If you bus three times as many tables as everyone else, statistically you’ll break more plates. Obviously, you want to keep the average down, but if you take every plate out of their paychecks you’re just going to end up with a slow, risk-averse bus staff.

Everyone you interact with is going to make mistakes sometimes. Punishing people for individual mistakes is one of the worst things you can do. If you’re a parent, a spouse, a manager, a coach – always look at the net output of whatever you’re evaluating. Don’t make someone else’s mistake yours.