We made too many wrong mistakes – Yogi Berra
Yogi Berra was an incredibly successful manager in baseball, but to many people he’s better known for his malapropisms. Some of his sayings are priceless–though to a writer such torture of the language can make you cringe. I was recently reminded of a Yogi-ism spoken after the Yankees had lost a game: “We made too many wrong mistakes.” At first it sounds like it’s redundant, but on further thought…
Is there such a thing as a right mistake? And if so, what’s the difference between a right mistake and a wrong mistake?
It seems to me that the difference is what (or whether!) we learn in the process. The great inventor Thomas Edison was once asked if he wasn’t frustrated by his failure to get results on several of his projects. Edison said, “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.“
Edison make right mistakes because he didn’t see things as failure; he saw them as learning opportunities. What kind of mistakes are you making?
