There is a paradox I wish to put on the table at once: I am not worthy of your attention because I exemplify perfect discipline, flawless organisation, or unbroken success. Quite the opposite. I may be worthy of your attention precisely because I have failed often—perhaps more often than many of you might imagine. I have wasted time, procrastinated, allowed disorder to dominate, and missed targets that appeared almost trivial.
Yet it was from that very starting-point that I began to build.
The Value of a Biography Marked by Errors
When I first presented myself as a time designer—one who studies and experiments with methods of time management—I carried an ambivalent feeling. On the one hand, I was acquainted with dozens of models; on the other, I was haunted by the sense that I failed to embody them. I was late, disorganised, distracted—in short, everything an expert in performance ought not to be. Such tendencies undermined my credibility, at least in my own eyes.
Eventually, however, I arrived at a crucial realisation: my real strength lay not in innate talent, but in the sheer number of times I had fallen and extracted some lesson from the fall. I experimented with more than five or six hundred methods of time management, and discovered in the end that none of them was miraculous. What mattered was not the method itself but the meta-analytical posture: to regard failures not as disgraces, but as data from which to learn.
As Karl Popper (1963/2002) observed: “Every discovery contains an ‘irrational element,’ or a ‘creative intuition’” (p. 32). Science progresses not in spite of errors but because of them.
When is an Error Truly an Error?
The most valuable lesson I have learned is this: an error becomes a true error only when it is excluded from a framework of learning. If I fail, analyse, correct, and try again, then I have not erred—I have merely conducted a test.
In performance psychology this approach is encapsulated in the concept of the growth mindset. Dweck (2006) notes: “In a growth mindset, challenges are exciting rather than threatening. So rather than thinking, oh, I’m going to reveal my weaknesses, you say, wow, here’s a chance to grow” (p. 33).
Errors, then, are not enemies. They are valuable indicators, pointing us towards the very domains in which we may progress.
Self-Insults: The Hidden Trap
A friend once said to me: “I am a failure; I am lazy.” He added: “How can you call this self-exculpatory? Is it not rather the opposite? Is it not a severe self-accusation?”
My answer was that, indeed, it is self-exculpatory—precisely because it relieves one of the burden of change. If I convince myself that I am lazy by nature, then I cease to seek strategies, to experiment, to improve. It is as though I were saying: “There is no point, for this is who I am.”
Ellis (1962) captured this dynamic clearly in his Rational-Emotive Therapy: “It is not the events themselves that disturb people, but the views they take of them” (p. 54).
To declare “I am lazy” is not an act of courageous self-criticism; it is a way of freezing oneself, of evading responsibility for the next experiment.
Errors as a Strategy of Learning
In my experience, the problem is not that one fails too often. The problem is that one fails too seldom, and without awareness.
Those who succeed in time management (or performance more broadly) are not those who discover the perfect method at once, but those who experiment extensively and learn rapidly.
Eric Ries (2011) gave this principle enduring form when he spoke of “validated learning”: “The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else” (p. 207).
The same applies to time management: the real goal is not to avoid mistakes, but to learn as swiftly as possible from organisational missteps.
Why Errors Teach More than Successes
Success gratifies us, yet teaches us little. When all goes well, we rarely pause to examine why. Success is pleasing, but it is often opaque.
Error, by contrast, is transparent: it thrusts our limitations into view, obliges us to reconsider, and forces a change of course.
As Donald Schön (1983) put it: “We learn by reflecting on surprises, on experiences that disrupt our expectations” (p. 68).
In other words: without error, there can be no meaningful learning.
Turning Failure into Psychological Capital
Performance psychology speaks of positive psychological capital: resilience, optimism, hope, self-efficacy. These qualities are not cultivated by evading errors, but by facing them directly.
Bandura (1997) captured this succinctly: “Self-efficacy beliefs provide the foundation for human motivation, well-being, and personal accomplishment” (p. 3).
In other words: authentic self-confidence does not arise from avoiding falls, but from learning to rise again.
An Invitation to Experiment
Here, then, is the message I would leave you with: fail more, but fail better.
- Do not insult yourself for failing; ask instead what it is teaching you.
- Do not seek the perfect method; seek many small experiments.
- Do not fear inconsistency; the only consistency that matters is fidelity to learning, not to an idealised image.
References
- Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman.
- Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York, NY: Random House.
- Ellis, A. (1962). Reason and emotion in psychotherapy. New York, NY: Lyle Stuart.
- Popper, K. (2002). Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. London, UK: Routledge. (Original work published 1963)
- Ries, E. (2011). The lean startup: How today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses. New York, NY: Crown Business.
- Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York, NY: Basic Books.
RED SCOREBOARD 
Leave a comment