Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett
Thomas Edison made 1000 unsuccessful attempts to make a light bulb or we can say that invention of light bulb took 1000 steps. We as human beings are bound to make mistakes and every mistake is a learning in its own way, it is a step towards doing things better in future.
Mistakes are largely inevitable when we sit down to execute a particular task and you really need to be an expert to get things right the very first time. In our work life also, we tend to make mistakes, many a times we fumble at doing a particular work and sometimes we fail. While mistakes are bound to happen, no matter what, there are certain things that you should, rather you must do when you make a mistake at work –
Own your mistakes
Accepting your mistakes gracefully doesn’t make you inferior or incompetent, rather not taking the ownership of your faults and shifting the blame on others puts a question mark on your integrity and honesty. Owning your mistakes is a first step towards correcting them, it’s only when you know what went wrong, you can actually think of ways to avoid it in future. Therefore, communicate it to the relevant people as soon as possible so that it doesn’t impact smooth functioning of operations.
Do not panic
There are ways and means to correct any mistake but a large part of your effort goes waste if you start to panic. You cannot come up with optimal solution with a constrained mindset. Imagine a scenario wherein you have to deliver an important task to your boss in the next one hour, you commit a small error which can impact your work quality and can take an extra one hour, here the best way to handle the situation is to apprise your boss about the potential delay, instead of hurrying up the things and ending up making the situation worse. Therefore, stay calm and focus more on solutions rather than the problem.
Seek help
If you have made a mistake and you are facing a hard time finding the solution then don’t be shy to take help from your peers or seniors. There could be some peculiar expertise that you are lacking and your co-worker might possess the same, it will help you in two ways; first and foremost, you will have a solution to your problem at hand and secondly, you will end up learning a new skill and that is how you can capitalize the most from your mistake.
Do not compromise on the quality
It is known fact that mistakes hamper the quality of work and sometimes you are not able to or not ready to put in that extra effort to correct it and further refine your final product, to the best of your ability. You might tend to hide or ignore some small mistakes, procrastinate their correction or just be laid back enough to rectify them to evade any additional burden of re-work or extra work but that beats the whole purpose of work as at the end, you won’t be able to come up with an error free output despite spending specified number of hours on the project and you definitely don’t wish to be second best, right? So at times, it is alright to stretch a bit, work a little extra, just to refine the quality of you work.
Introspect
Last but not the least, before seeking help or reworking on anything, just introspect, try to come up with some tangible solutions and you can surely do that as you are the only one who is closely associated with your task. Your supervisor can provide you with guidance and your peers can help you out temporarily but it is only you who can control further occurrence of errors. So introspect and it can actually produce wonderful results
So, it is alright commit some errors, but you should never give up, give it another attempt, try to imbibe the above mentioned points and do it again with the same level of zeal and confidence, who knows, you might come out with flying colours!
