Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.
Thomas Carlyle
The meaning of the quote
On 13 March 1843, Thomas Carlyle wrote back to a young man he barely knew. The young man had asked which books would help him improve himself.
Carlyle said he couldn’t choose books for a stranger, but in his reply he gave one piece of advice that fits anyone.
“There is precious instruction to be got by finding that we are wrong.”
The quote says the same in plainer words. A mistake on its own teaches you nothing. The lesson comes from working out why it happened, and you can only do that if you’re willing to look at it.
Embarrassment is what stops most people from looking. A failed test goes to the bottom of the school bag and a bad job interview never gets thought about again. You hide the mistake and keep the gap that caused it.
Psychologists have found a reason to look anyway. When people are sure of an answer and find out it’s wrong, they’re more likely to remember the right answer later than when they were only guessing. The Learning Scientists reported on this finding, which researchers call the hypercorrection effect. The surprise of being wrong seems to make people pay closer attention to the fix.
The mistake that makes you cringe the most may be the one you learn from best.
One look isn’t enough, though. Memory-Key reported on a study where students who were retested straight after getting feedback fixed 86% of their errors. Students retested a week later fixed only 56%, and their most confident mistakes were the ones most likely to come back.
Going back to old mistakes is the self-education the quote talks about. Nobody grades you on it, so you have to do it yourself. Peter C. Brown’s quote It’s not the failure that’s desirable makes the same case, that practice with the odd failure along the way helps learning last.
Action steps
Turning a mistake into a lesson takes a notebook and a few minutes.
- Write the mistake down the same day.
Note what went wrong and why you think it happened. “I forgot to carry the 1” teaches you more than “I’m bad at maths.” - Write what you’ll do differently.
One line is enough, such as “Check my working before I hand it in.” - Come back to it a week later.
Cover the answer and test yourself. If the old mistake creeps back, you’ve found the one that needs more work.
About the author
Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 in Ecclefechan, a Scottish village, the eldest son of a stonemason. At 13 he walked about 100 miles to Edinburgh to start university, and much of what he went on to know he taught himself, including German.
In 1834 he moved to Chelsea, London, and began a history of the French Revolution. After months of work, he made a mistake any writer would dread. He lent the only copy of the first volume to his friend John Stuart Mill, and Mill’s maid burned the pages as waste paper.
Carlyle started again. He compared it to a strict schoolmaster tearing up his homework and telling him to do it better, and he felt the second version came more directly from the heart. The French Revolution: A History came out in 1837 and made him one of the best-known writers in Britain.
He wrote to the young man in 1843, 8 years after the fire, from the same Chelsea house where he had rewritten his burned book. You can read the full letter in Advice to Young Men, where his thoughts on mistakes sit beside his advice on reading and work.
Resources
- The French Revolution: A History (Book)
- Advice to Young Men (Article)
- Confident and wrong: Can students learn from their mistakes? (Article)
- Mistakes are the portals (Article)
- Thomas Carlyle (Wikipedia)
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