Louis Davidson is hosting this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, and asks us to relive mistakes. Ouch! It’s fine – I already had a psychologist appointment scheduled for later in the week.
The name of this post “Really, Louis?” is nothing to do with how Louis thought for a number of years that Arnie Rowland was me. But rather about how people (especially “conscientious types” (that’s only ‘code’ if you want it to be) like so many of us in the data world) frequently take ourselves back through our mistakes, beating ourselves up about it, thinking about how we could’ve avoided it, what we could’ve done better (before, during and after), as if time machines could exist.
I mean, sure, there’s a school of thought that because we learn through our mistakes, we become stronger. But you know, I’d rather learn through near misses. “Oh, that could’ve been bad, let me code up something so that doesn’t happen” is a better experience than having to learn when a disaster has actually happened. And hands up if you know that having a good ‘disaster recovery’ plan only saves you from certain problems, not all problems… thank you, I see that hand. And that one. Yup. All the hands.
There’s an article on Psychology Today called “Coming Out of the Shadows of Our Worst Mistakes“, by Rodney Luster, PhD (he has a blog called “More Than A Feeling” which has a lot of great posts and is worth looking at if you have mental health struggles). One of his points is that even a single mistake can heighten anxiety and depression symptoms. And still, we all make mistakes. All of us. Data professionals included.
Our mistakes shouldn’t define us. We can quote Sting when he sings that “history will teach us nothing”, but we hope that each mistake makes us likely to fall into the same patterns that led us into trouble before. I heard something recently that says our histories might describe us, but they don’t define us. And I want to assure you, reader (and myself), that your history is more about successes than your failures. You wouldn’t be where you are today if you weren’t good at what you’d do. (You would’ve been promoted into management instead.)
As Dr Luster writes, our mistakes can cast shadows over us. Over our mental wellbeing. Over our general mood. We can feel guilt and shame about mistakes, and it can take proper effort to feel redeemed. As a Christian, I know that this is a major aspect of Christianity. The Bible says that we’ve been set free from our guilt and shame, and God loves (and likes) us despite our failings. And yet, we relive our mistakes. Especially the ones involving those areas in which we know we’re meant to do better. Where we’re supposedly ‘experts’.
I’m not going to dwell on my mistakes today. Well, I’m not going to dwell on my mistakes any more today. I’ve already spent time doing that, even though I knew it wasn’t a good idea. I thought at some point in my life I would work out how to stop reliving mistakes, but that’s not a skill I’ve learned yet.
I say to my clients, “Don’t worry – we’ve all done it”, and “You’re not a proper data professional until you’ve stuffed something up”. For some reason, I still remember a question in the Microsoft Certified Master that dealt with corruption, and (without going into any detail, because NDA, and because I really don’t remember the detail) failing to grab a copy of the database files first. That’s not a mistake I’d ever made with a corrupt database in the real world (and there had been plenty I’d handled – I think I had a reputation for fixing corruption, back when it was more common than nowadays), but in the exam – yeah, made the mistake. Maybe it was because it was an exam. Maybe it was because I was sitting by myself (not alongside a customer). That day in the exam, I found myself wanting those files (because of another mistake!), and didn’t have them.
The consequence of my mistake in that exam was basically nothing. I passed the exam and earned my MCM status. Apparently I scraped through with the lowest passing score I could get. But I still passed. That corrupt database question didn’t matter at all. And yet, every so often, it appears in my thoughts. I wonder whether I would make that mistake again, perhaps in an environment where it would matter more. So you can imagine how much I relive the mistakes that actually count for something…
The mistake I’m going to relive for you/Louis is the mistake of reliving my mistakes, as I’ve been describing. I know it sounds meta – but I learned recently that ‘meta’ is the Portuguese word for ‘goal’ (not the football goal, but the thing you’re trying to achieve), so maybe it’s okay that it’s meta. It’s a useful goal to stop reliving your mistakes, even if it is meta.
My advice to you is to learn forgiveness. Forgive everyone else their mistakes. It’s easy to forgive people their mistakes because, by definition, they’re unintentional. So do that, and get used to doing that. Then work out how to forgive yourself for your own.
…and teach me how to do it… 😉
@robfarley.com@bluesky (previously @rob_farley@twitter)
