hello my name is Kevin and today we're going to talk about mistakes
and how they're the seeds of knowledge uh so i want to talk about not fearing mistakes
you should not fear mistakes because mistakes are a crucial part of learning without them you can't
learn that's the whole point of a mistake is you find the mistake and then you learn from it if you
don't know that you're making mistakes if you're not paying attention to them you're not going
to learn you're just going to keep making those mistakes and so there's three kind of things that
i want to point out about mistakes that hopefully make you feel more comfortable with them and not
fear them first mistakes are the seeds of learning with a mistake you have an
opportunity to learn you should embrace those mistakes collect them and cultivate them and so
i drew a wonderful comic here of someone tossing their mistakes these are seeds of mistakes
you find your mistakes you hold on to them you toss them into a field it rains
and from those mistakes from those seeds you have a grassy field sunny day and a big
tree and so this tree represents the learning or knowledge you gain from making those mistakes so
don't fear the mistakes embrace them they are the seeds of learning and the seeds of knowledge also
know there are many different types of mistakes we always hear like oh you made a mistake and assume
that it's like one thing but a mistake is like a big category of different things there's lots of
different types of mistakes just like there's lots of different types of seeds and depending on the
type of mistake you do different things to uh to cultivate your learning so sometimes you have a
mistake that's truly just a lack of knowledge like it's a concept or idea that you've never
seen before and you made a mistake just because it was entirely new and so you know with this
type of mistake you have to go out and study learn that new concept figure out all the ins
and outs so that you can have that knowledge and take it with you and not make the mistake again
another type of mistake that happens a lot with the GMAT just because it's a really long test
and people are studying for long periods of time and sometimes you make a mistake because
we're tired or we're stressed that's normal you get tired you make mistakes
you get stressed you make mistakes you lose focus um that type of mistake you correct it a
different type of way you get rest or you take deep breaths to relax and not feel the stress
another type of mistake i think this i drew this to be like an avocado seed it's a big
seed silly mistakes um some types of mistakes we sort of classify these sort of silly errors that
when we go back and look we're like oh man why did i do that i knew how to solve this problem you
just like made like one tiny error at the end like it was like forgetting to carry a one over to the
tens column or like miscalculating uh a percentage or something and so or not rounding correctly
those like little mistakes where you like know the concept but if you were a little bit more focused
and you took your time a little bit more you wouldn't have made that mistake so that's another
type of mistake and easily correct it another type of mistake as well is that you forget the task
or you misread the question this is again kind of related to focus maybe fatigue and stress as well
but sometimes you just are solving a problem you work through a lot of it
and you get to the end you're like oh this is the answer and you go back and look for look at the
answers or the correct answers excuse me and you see oh wait a second i didn't take one more step
to get to the actual answer or you just misread what you were looking for sometimes
you know you might have like you're trying to calculate or you're working in geometry and you're
calculating the area of a rhombus really you should be calculating the perimeter of a rhombus
those like mistakes where you're not diagnosing the problem correctly so and there's more as well
but see there's a collection of mistakes and each one is different and you do something different
to correct it so it's important to catalog your mistakes and take different steps to correct them
finally you aren't the mistake let me say that again you are not the mistake um it's a tragedy
in this world that people connect the mistake to the person that they think oh i made a mistake
and i'm a bad person or it somehow reflects your character which is ridiculous we should
we should tell people they're in a great job if they make mistakes we should encourage people
to make mistakes because remember mistakes are the seeds of learning and so we want people to
struggle we want people to um find something hard and make a mistake to like stretch their brain
because that means they're improving and learning and becoming a better person so you are not the
mistake remember you just happen to make a mistake it's an action it's a thing outside of you so
instead of saying getting down on yourself saying oh man i'm so bad and terrible i made a mistake
just be like huh what did i do that led me to this wrong answer and what can i do next time to avoid
making that same decision and so the mistake is something separate from you it's seeds those are
seeds outside of you and you are a gardener and you're collecting these seeds of mistakes
you're throwing them on the ground watering them and cultivating a beautiful flower of knowledge
all right so don't fear mistakes um there is an associated article that will be down below here
that you can go and read more about this idea but embrace your mistakes that's how you're
going to improve on the GMAT be excellent to the universe and i will see you next tuesday