Learning from Your Mistakes

In my experience, doctors who sustain long and rewarding careers have certain distinguishing characteristics. Among them is the freedom to make mistakes. That means facing something we’re all afraid of … the F word. Failure.

Many people think that failure is something to be avoided at all costs. There is good news and bad news to report on that. The good news is that failure can be avoided – by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing. The bad news is that to achieve anything, you must accept risk, which brings with it the possibility for disappointment and failure.

If you have never experienced failure, you have never pushed the envelope or stretched hard enough and long enough to reach your maximum potential. You can never steal second base if you keep both feet on first. You will never experience the exhilaration of discovery without enduring the pain of an experimental dead-end.

In very few endeavors of life is the risk of failure more immediate or more clearly defined than in heart surgery. Four or more times each day, I’d completely stop a patient’s heart for one or two hours; perform some type of surgical intervention, and attempt to restart the heart. In each case, there was a moment of tension while I waited to see if the heart would start beating. Were all my decisions correct? Are all sutures accurately placed? Did I operate rapidly enough? In 99% of the cases, the heart started pumping; the tension was relieved; we moved on. It was this potential for failure that kept us ever vigilant. I can barely remember all the thousands of successful cardiac surgeries I performed over 30 years. But the 1% that were less-than successful, are burned into my memory. That’s where most of my lessons were learned.

Winston Churchill defined success as “going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Failure may be an event in your life, but it is not who you are.

Failure is an opportunity to learn. We may learn that our present strategy won’t work; we may learn that our goal was not worthy; we may learn that we quit too soon. Failure will teach you, if you let it.

by

 Delos Cosgrove