One of the more exciting things humans can do that animals normally don’t is to make mistakes…and live. Making mistakes is a crude, albeit effective form of learning (of course I’m assuming one learns from their mistakes.) To get a better idea of what this means, let’s imagine ourselves as a toad trying to cross the 405 Southbound freeway at rush hour. You’re sitting with a bunch of friends, eating bugs, trying to see who can touch the most remote part of their body with their tongue and laughing at how silly frogs look.

Suddenly you feel a desire to visit the little Toad’s room but the problem is that it’s on the other side of the freeway. “I’ll just hop to the other side, do my business and be right back”, you think as you line up with the side of the highway. The large, noisy things zooming past you are bothersome but since you’ve never dealt with them before, assume they must be okay. With one last toady wave to your buddies, you start to hop across. Aside from the funny feeling of the hard looking ground, you figure how great it will be to get back to your buddies and tell them the latest lady toad joke you heard.

Before you know it, there’s a loud noise, a crunch then all goes black…looking down you see what looks like a flatten toad and realize that is your mortal remains. “Sa-a-a-a-a-ay, maybe it’s not a good idea to hop across a busy freeway”, you realize as you float upwards. Too bad there’s no way to warn the others as you notice your best friend Frank, lining up with the edge of the freeway.

We make mistakes to learn. Many times in the absence of any theories, heuristic learning (also known as “trial and error”) is the only process available to figure out how processes work. There’s an excellent book called “Who Goes First” by Dr. Lawerence K. Altman which documents medical researchers who conducted self-experimentation to see the effects of various diseases on the human body. Dr. Walter Reed and members of his staff deliberately infected themselves with Yellow Fever to learn more about the effects on the human body. Was this a mistake? If they died with nothing more learned about this dreaded disease but they didn’t.

Everyone would like to think they do things perfectly and make no errors. The truth is sometimes we can learn some interesting things such as vulcanization of rubber or the invention of the post-it notepads. In both cases, the researchers were actually looking for something else when they made their “mistake”. My grandfather used to say the only people who don’t make mistakes are people who do nothing and after fifty years, I agree with him.

So the next time you make a mistake, see if you can’t learn something from it and you will realize making mistakes is just a part of being human. By the way, it’s still not safe for humans to cross the 405 at rush hour…