TRANSCRIPT
The value in making mistakes. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. Done a lot of really stupid, clumsy things. I think I’m glad to say I did a lot more of it when I was younger. Certainly, as a kid, I did a lot of confusing, stupid stuff. Stuff that turned out like, “ooh, I don’t really like the result of what I just did.” Sometimes even being hurtful to other people, being hurtful to myself. That’s why I considered it a mistake. Basically, a mistake being something that I don’t really wish to repeat.
Some of the mistakes I made, I well had to repeat multiple times before I realized ultimately this is not the outcome that maybe consciously or unconsciously I was hoping for. So when I talk about the subject of making mistakes, what comes to my mind really is the value in experimentation. The value in being able to experiment, to be able to try things out, to see what happens. To try something out and not necessarily know what the result will be. And that fundamentally for me comes down to the root of what science is.
Probably a big part of why I was drawn to science as a child, why I spent four years in college studying science, studying biology. It’s like at some intuitive level I liked the idea of conducting experiments. I wasn’t conscious about it, but certainly as a child, certainly into my adulthood, even now, it’s like in a way making these videos is a kind of experiment. I never know how they’re going to turn out. I’m not following any sort of script. And sometimes afterwards I look at them and say, “cut, don’t like this video, don’t make it public.” Or sometimes I say, “cut,” and then later, two months later, I was like, “wait, actually that was a much better video than I realized at the time and I do want to put this up.” But really not knowing how things are going to turn out.
The reason that I like experimenting so much, even love experimenting, is that if I hadn’t been someone who experimented as a child, I would have been someone who just followed the course that was set out for me by my parents, by my teachers, by my society, by the television even. And I would have been miserable. In fact, I tried to be a good boy who didn’t experiment, who never made mistakes. My mother expected me to be perfect in a lot of ways, and that’s part of why I had to get away from her. Even as a young child, I needed to get out into the neighborhood and play with other boys and do some good things that she wouldn’t have allowed and do some bad things that she wouldn’t have allowed.
But I had to learn how to screw up away from her because she would reject me, abandon me if I screwed up in ways that she couldn’t appreciate, that threatened her. So in a way, I wasn’t allowed to experiment all that much around her. I had to be a much more rigid person in line with her own rigidity. So I think of the experiments that I did. They were basically explorations in my life to try to figure out, well, what is reality beyond this basically insane, denial-laden reality of my family’s system?
Both my parents were so emotionally shut down, so dishonest in so many ways. Unconsciously dishonest by being profoundly in denial in all sorts of ways and also lying. And also both my parents were big liars in a lot of ways. So they were consciously lying, not with knowledge of what they were doing. And therefore that family system was not a place that I could grow up in and become a healthy person. So I had to get out into the world and try different things.
And because I wasn’t given a real foundation in exploring reality in a really healthy way, a lot of my experiments really turned out to be failures. Those were the mistakes that I made. And what I later learned when I learned about the theory of science was that actually an experiment where you don’t know what the outcome will be, that is a good experiment. And if the experiment proves true in some ways, that’s a great answer. And if the experiment proves false in some ways, that’s a great answer too. So as long as you ask a good question, if you really don’t know what the answer will be to this experiment, no matter what the outcome is, you can learn from it.
Nowadays in modern science, so much of modern science is so fake. They set up experiments specifically to get the right answer, to prove some point, often so that it will be published, so that it will make money, so that it will make sometimes companies very big money. Also, if the experiment turns out to be a failure, it won’t make money or it just won’t get published. A lot of science nowadays is really twisted away from conducting real experiments.
But I think in my life I’ve seen this with a lot of other people who make a lot of mistakes. The key is to conduct experiments. How else can you learn unless you really screw up? One caveat, and the caveat is how else can you learn except if you screw up if you’re able to acknowledge what the screw-up is? And so I think of the exception for myself is many of the experiments I conducted where I made the same mistake over and over and over again. I did some of that certainly in my earlier years, some pretty bad ones in fact.
And that comes up with that definition of insanity. Insanity, it’s not being mentally ill according to psychiatry. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results. Well, I did a lot of that, and those were the mistakes that I made where I didn’t want to look at the answer that I was getting. I didn’t want to acknowledge it as a mistake. Sometimes I would make the mistake and bury all my feelings and block it out and do it again and do it again and do it again.
The real key was for me to be able to look at my behavior, to stop and say, “what am I doing?” Because so many of the experiments I did, as it were, I wasn’t even conscious of. So it was like an unconscious experiment. Therefore, if I got a result I didn’t like, I never even had to make it conscious. I could bury it. So the key was sometimes for me later to go back and look at, well, what really unconsciously was I playing at? What were my motives? To really study my motives and to really understand my motives really helped me understand what was the experiment that I was actually conducting. What was I, what result was I trying to get, and did I achieve that result or not?
A lot of times I think I’ve learned a lot more from the experiments that I conducted where I made terrible mistakes. It’s like I really feel my errors fueled my progress. They were the things when I later went back and looked at them because a lot of times a lot of the experiments I did, I never looked at them for five, ten, fifteen years after the fact. I brought them back to memory and looked at what I did and felt the shame, felt the sadness, felt the pain, felt the guilt, felt the disgust at myself even, and was able to really process it and say, “oh, that’s what I was trying, that’s what motivated it, and that was the result.”
So I think of those mistakes that I made, those mistakes being the blind alleys I went on in my life that really taught me this doesn’t work, this causes others or myself harm, or causes the world harm. This does bad things for the world and things that really gave me a chance to self-reflect, to look at myself and to say, “what really is good for the true self within me? What honors the true self within me and the true self of others and the truth of the world? What really is good?” And in a way, I believe there is such a thing as good, and I believe there is such a thing as bad, if only from my human perspective. Good is what honors the true self of others, and bad is what honors, does not, what dishonors the true self. What violates others, what violates me is bad. What honors me, the real…
Me, not my false me, my false needs. What honors the truth of me that is good? And for me to really study things in a dispassionate way, in my own private self, in my own little anonymous world, if only in my journal or in my meditations or in my self-reflective thoughts as I take a walk at the end of my day, to really process, well, what is the result of my actions? What is the result of my life?
And so the goal of all this is to keep growing for me. And when I see other people who are also making mistakes, I think of myself as a therapist. When I was a therapist, when people would come to me, often they would come to a therapist, or even nowadays just as a person in my life. When people approach me, it’s like usually when people hit the wall of having made so many mistakes, they maybe don’t even realize what mistakes are or that they’ve made mistakes, but just realize that something isn’t working in their life. That is an incredible opportunity for change. It’s a time of humility. Humility being a chance to learn, a chance to have life teach you something new.
And I think of what I see in other people and what I saw in myself when I kept making mistakes and not learning from it. It was a time when I was much more arrogant. And I see a lot of people in the world, maybe the humanity in general, very, very arrogant, making the same mistakes again and again and not learning from it.
And when eventually my pain caught up to me, my sorrow caught up to me, my loneliness and isolation caught up to me, I became more teachable, more open to really study myself. And I realized, oh, I had a lot of raw material to learn from. I had all those mistakes, thousands of them, to really learn from and to piece together a map of who I was, what I was doing, what I had done, what was really going on on the inside of me. All that pain that I was acting out, all that unresolved trauma, all that desperation for love, and all the different blind alleys I went on to try to get loved. Because a lot of it really, a lot of my mistakes really came out of an unconscious desire to be loved in the ways in which my parents never really loved me properly, ways that I deserved as a child.
So I think of the world in general, humanity in general, all the mistakes that humanity in general is making. People are making even some of the mistakes I’m still making. The goal being, I believe, to be able to look at what the deeper motive is. What is the experiment that is being conducted? What is the unconscious need that the person is playing out? What does the person really want when they’re trying this action? And why is it failing? And what can we learn from this failure? And how can we grow from it?