Interesting read popped up in my LinkedIn feed about the importance of screwing up early at a new job. Boils down to getting over your fear of making mistakes when you are a newbie, it is going to happen, actually, it is expected. Once you do, you can get to the business of learning the right way to do your job. As the author, Ross McCammon shared:
The main failure of my first couple of years in New York was the shame I felt at making mistakes. If I have a regret, this is it. I was too caught up in the fear of making mistakes. I sometimes acted timidly. In the short term, I probably did “better” work, but in the long term I did worse work because I didn’t allow myself to get my mistakes over with early.
McCammon also pointed out that:
mistakes are useful when you’re willing to have a conversation about them, when you’re willing to be corrected.
From my own experience right out of graduate school and starting a new job, I often obsessed with not messing up. Looking back, there were several times I should have stopped obsessing and just learned from it.
So monkeys…any memorable mistakes when you first started out?
