Rise up from mistakes

Rise up from mistakes

Mistake is really a very familiar word to us all. Either in the work or in the daily life, we have been making mistakes all the time. Facing those mistakes we have made, what do we do? Some people may run away from them, but some do bravely face them and take responsibilities of bad results. In my opinion, mistake is not a terrible thing. Sometimes, it may bring you into troubles and make you lose something. If a person has enough courage to account for the mistake, even if he gets a lose, he will get a chance to retrieve something. Do realize the thing is mistake that can usually and mostly make people a big progress. Mistake is not terrible but valuable. Here I want to talk about how to obtain profits from making mistakes.

Since I joined the current team in IBM, I have made a lot and diverse types of mistakes. Some could be avoided absoluely and some couldn't. Some are simply avoidable becuase I was not careful enough, whereas others occurred due to my poor technological knowledge and experience. Well, the most important thing is not to repeat which ever happened.

I found an efficient way to let us do better. My job is software testing. I find that we can absorb some useful ideas from software testing. For a tester, defect is the most familiar thing because what he does all day is overwhelmingly to disclose and reproduce defects in software products. He has a set of methodologies to isolate and manage defects system, by the analysis of which the management team can improve the quality of software. How much can we learn from this defect disclosure and management process? I say a lot!

First of all, we should have the sense of exposing innerness's defects. At most time, mistakes in us innerness are visible, while the point is whether we dare to admit, not surfacely but profoundly and honestly. The reason that a mistake can scare us is that we are afraid of losing something such as money, face or other things. We need to realize, when we decide to aviod mistakes, we are actually losing excellcent spirits and going to lose chances in the future. It is the excellent spirit that makes us succeed. At some time, mistakes are dormant but still we can find them out by observing our situations or relationships such as friends and colleagues.

Second, in order to at most abtain profits from mistakes, we should know how to manage them with some engineering methods. My way is to record them in an excel table. At first, you have to define some attributes for a mistake, such as its severity, priority, keywords, description, cause type, especially action item and so on. In every fixed time, review them and think why you made or why you always make the same mistake over and over.

Next, after you find the root causes that trigger those mistakes, you should follow the action items to correct them and avoid reoccuring.

Last but not least, don't be afraid of making mistakes. Rein them, rather than being reined, and experiment them to improve yourself. Discard the old saying "A fox may grow gray, but never good". I think such a saying is a very dull execuse people often use. Believe that you can change everything if you set your heart to do.