If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning.
Mind Map Journal
The meaning of the quote
In 2005, journalist Joshua Foer went to the USA Memory Championship to write about people who could memorize a shuffled deck of cards in minutes. The next year he entered the contest himself and won it.
Partway through his training, he got stuck. His card times stopped falling no matter how much he practiced. In the book Moonwalking with Einstein, he calls this the OK plateau, the point where you’re good enough at something that it runs on autopilot and you stop getting better.
He asked a psychologist who studied how experts get good, and was told to buy a metronome. Foer memorized one card per click, then set the metronome 10 to 20% faster than his comfortable pace and kept going until the mistakes stopped. Every card that tripped him up went into a note so he could work out why. Within a couple of days, his times started falling again.
Foer got faster by making mistakes on purpose.
Getting everything right feels good, but it usually means you’re repeating what you already know. A mistake shows you where the edge of your skill is, and that edge is where the learning happens.
Researchers who tried to put a number on this taught computers simple sorting tasks, and ScienceAlert reported that the machines learned fastest when they got about 15% of the answers wrong. When the task was too easy, there was nothing left to learn, and when it was too hard, they couldn’t make progress.
The tests used computers and simple yes-or-no choices, so the 15% figure is a rough guide for people rather than a target for your exam grades. The study’s lead author told TODAY that schools and parents push too hard for perfection.
“Perfection is not going to be optimal for learning.”
Daniel Coyle’s quote Deep practice is not measured makes the same case for practice. What counts is how often you stretch past what you can do, fall short and try again.
Action steps
You can use Foer’s metronome trick on almost any skill.
- Pick 1 skill that has stopped improving.
Typing, times tables, a guitar chord change or a language you’ve studied for a year all count. If it feels easy and nothing has changed in months, you’re on the plateau. - Push it 10 to 20% past comfortable.
Type faster than feels safe, read a harder book or play the song at a quicker tempo. If you aren’t making any mistakes, push a little more. - Write down every mistake and why it happened.
Your list shows you exactly what to practice next.
If your last week of practice had no mistakes in it, you spent that week on the plateau.
Resources
- Moonwalking with Einstein (Book)
- Feats of memory anyone can do (YouTube)
- Learning is optimized when we fail 15% of the time (Article)
- Learning through mistakes: From Einstein to Edison (Article)
- Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes (Article)
- Joshua Foer (Wikipedia)
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