Mistakes I Made at Work: 25 Influential Women Reflect on What They Got Out of Getting It Wrong

by Jessica Bacal

The problem is that anyone who wants to innovate, gain recognition, or become a leader will need to take risks and realize that mistakes are inevitable.

I’d learned that when you privilege how you appear to others over how you are to yourself—when you choose seeming over being—you drift away from the strongest parts of who you are. The right to claim personal authority in your life is about claiming passion, and passion is what feeds our most important convictions and values.

Sometimes being comfortable in a place isn’t a good enough reason to stay there. It’s okay to take risks.

When you have major setbacks, you ironically begin to feel like you can do anything because the worst has already happened and you’re no longer paralyzed by the fear of something not working out. If I hadn’t run for office, I would never be where I am now, the founder of a successful nonprofit. That’s why I tell young people to fail fast, fail hard, and fail often.

A loss in a run for public office—or in any situation where you’re competing for a job—isn’t necessarily indicative of how you’d do that job, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep trying for it. It’s the same as when you’re starting a company and asking for investment: If your first company doesn’t work out, does that mean that you can’t still be an entrepreneur or have a successful business? No!

The only path to success is keeping the faith.

JOANNA BARSH “If you don’t have a passion, there’s nothing wrong with you. I think that life is not so much about following your passion, but about realizing that your journey is a long one. Focus on developing hard skills like problem solving, business writing, and presenting, and soft skills like taking initiative, getting along with others, and engaging in meetings. Get curious about what you enjoy doing (and don’t enjoy), and notice what gives you a lot of energy.”

The lesson is: resistance is just resistance.

The act of bringing anything into the world, of taking an idea and making it real, means bringing it from the state of absolute perfection in your mind into a state of relative imperfection in reality. Every novel or painting is like this: perfect in the maker’s mind, but imperfectly realized. You can look at this as a mistake or simply as an opportunity to engage—because it’s through the making of mistakes that we are able to live creative lives.

Ruth Ozeki