“We need a new error culture where mistakes aren’t judged but welcomed. We want a culture where admitting mistakes isn’t seen as weakness but as strength.” I hear this constantly. But how far have we actually come? We often can’t even deal with our own mistakes. Yet mistakes aren’t terrible. They’re forward-pointing signals for a better future. Next time we’ll do it differently.
Much harder is the next step, the next level up and often a consequence of making mistakes: stopping. We learn from mistakes. Simple enough. Mistakes help us optimise, get better.
But what if optimising isn’t worth it at all, because you’ll only get useless innovation, not progress? Then we’d have to say: “That’s enough. We’re leaving it now.” And yet we keep going. Always going. Why?
Mistakes happen. After all, we’re humans, not machines. But when we stop, let go, leave something unfinished, just walk away, it feels like defeat. The hoped-for potential wasn’t reached, the venture was too risky, we overestimated our work, luck wasn’t on our side. Or worse: we were too lazy, scattered and simply too bad.
But stop? Never. We’ve already put so much time in, time that went missing elsewhere - often from family. If nothing comes of it now, that’s embarrassing and would be a waste of energy and life time, many think. But the time is gone. Either way.
What will people think if I just stop like this? I fear they don’t think much. Because - and this isn’t meant to sound cynical - most people aren’t really that interested in your defeats. They don’t even notice. It only hurts in your belly, in your head.
And if that’s true, that others don’t even notice your letting go (even if you tweet or Instagram it live), then letting go and stopping is much easier. Because it’s only about you.
Making mistakes is so easy. It happens quickly, you don’t even need to try. And even when you do try and a mistake happens (or let’s say, something doesn’t turn out as imagined - that’s hardly a mistake), then the insight is all the more valuable.
Stopping is different calibre. Much harder, because after stopping nothing comes first. Snap. Then emptiness.
Many can’t bear this. They only stop something when they already know what they can replace it with. But careful: as long as we don’t know this alternative, we little scaredy-cats definitely won’t stop.
Deep in our gut we know we can’t keep going like before. This isn’t just about climate change, child labour or the pension system, but about very personal decisions at work, in family, everywhere.
How do we get out of this? We need a culture of stopping. Harald Welzer writes in his book that you must be able to stop. This means we need to practise stopping and thus deciding. Because the decision is so exhausting, we’d rather push it into the future. Oh, I don’t feel good today, I’ll think about it tomorrow. Or next year. Better never.
But stopping is also simple. You just have to let go. Soon you wonder why what you no longer have was so important.
We should be grateful to have had it. Coal power plants brought us to where we are now. You can celebrate that too and not demonise everything just because we don’t want coal power plants anymore. I once wanted to be a video producer. I bought a good camera, dove deep into Final Cut Pro. But I didn’t follow through because something deep inside resisted this path. Eventually I told myself I had to stop. It simply cost too much time for nothing.
I’m certain we learn even more from stopping than from mistakes. The insight from stopping is simply deeper. It helps us see things fundamentally differently and not even start projects that are only ego-driven and have nothing to do with us.
The advanced level is stopping without replacement. What remains is simply time for the “useless”. We stuff ourselves full of pointless things anyway. So let go.
Originally auf Deutsch at reinergaertner.de, running since 1997. The translation had AI help. The typos are all mine.