Some people don’t get to make mistakes. Pilots, heart surgeons, and skydivers—they need to get it right the first time, and every time after that. Those are not the people you ever want to tell you, “I’m going to try something new that might not work.”
But unless you’re facing potentially catastrophic consequences, you might be better off inviting mistakes than you are avoiding them.
Not the kind of mistake that happens because you just didn’t care or try enough. Those mistakes are harder to come back from. But the mistake that happened in spite of pairing good intent with equally good effort? As long as you extract the necessary learning from it, it’s hard to call that a bad mistake.
An essential element of greatness is the willingness to make great mistakes.