Three Stages of Making Mistakes
Progress is measured in inches, not in miles.
Students feel stuck because they are still making mistakes. It will be helpful for them to understand that progress isn’t just about eliminating errors, but about how one interacts with them. There are three distinct stages in this journey:
- Unconscious Error: This is the first stage. A person makes a mistake and is completely unaware of it. They proceed with the wrong information, not even realizing an error has occurred.
- Delayed Recognition: In the second stage, a person makes a mistake and continues solving the question. It’s only much later or at the very end when the final answer is wrong that they realize an error must have happened somewhere. They then have to spend a significant amount of time and effort retracing their steps to find the mistake.
- Immediate Recognition: This is the most advanced stage and a clear sign of growth. The person starts to make a mistake, but a well-honed intuition immediately alerts them. A thought like, “Wait, this doesn’t feel right,” pops up. They pause, identify the error almost as it happens, and correct it before moving forward.
The key insight is this: Growth is the transition from one stage to the next.
Moving from being completely unaware of your mistakes (Stage 1) to being able to find them after the fact (Stage 2) is progress. But the most significant leap is moving to Stage 3, where you catch your mistakes in real-time.
So, if you feel you’re still making mistakes, ask yourself: “How quickly am I recognizing them?”
If you are catching your errors faster than you did before, you are undeniably making progress. Your self-awareness and intuition are getting sharper. You are not stuck; you are evolving. Your method of measuring progress was simply too narrow to show you the growth that was already happening.
