Making the Right Mistakes

When a very young child makes a mistake, we don’t consider it a failure. We laugh, we applaud, we encourage. But when the same child goes to school we turn the tables.

Success then becomes getting everything ‘right’. Failure is when you make ‘mistakes’ and get things ‘wrong’.

In doing this, we encourage young people to focus on getting the right answer, other than asking an interesting question. We encourage them to play it safe, avoiding the risk of getting things wrong, of exploring, of failing.

But inventions and discovery are all about making plenty of mistakes and having oodles of failures.

These are the ‘right mistakes’. Or, if you like, the “‘Wright mistakes”. So why don’t we encourage young people to make more of them?

Here is what I think about making the right mistakes.

And here is the documentary I made with the remarkable Emma Crouch.