You need to make mistakes to get ahead

By Alina Tugend, Special to CNN

August 2, 2011 8:45 a.m. EDT

Editor's note: Alina Tugend, author of Better By Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong, has been a journalist for nearly 30 years. She lives outside New York City with her husband and their two sons.
(CNN) -- We live in a culture that sends out very mixed messages about mistakes: We're told we learn by making them, but we work mightily to avoid them; that no one's perfect, but goofing-up is bad. So the result is most of us know that we -- as parents, spouses, employers and employees -- are going to make mistakes, but deep down, we feel we shouldn't.
But since, as the old saw goes, "to err is human," how do we work toward accepting mistakes and learn from them, rather than avoiding and denying them? Well, the good news is that there are upsides to making mistakes:
One of the definitions of "to err" is "to wander or stray." Often we make mistakes because we try new things -- we stray from accepted paths. Teflon, penicillin -- these are examples of great discoveries made by mistake. Take a page from Albert Einstein, who said, "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new." Continued at CNN...