🎭 The Divine Art of Screwing Up
There is something truly beautiful about making mistakes.
Not at the time, of course.
At the time, mistakes feel like evidence in an ongoing trial against your own intelligence.
But later? In hindsight?
Mistakes are the tiny breadcrumbs that show you wandered somewhere interesting before finding your way back to competence.
Or, at the very least, to being slightly less of an idiot than before.
The word error comes from the Latin errare, which means to wander.
Which means that, for all of human history, mistakes have been less about failing and more about taking the scenic route to success.
The trouble is, we don’t teach people to wander anymore.
We teach them to arrive.
From childhood, we are taught that errors are bad. That failure is to be avoided. That the correct answer is the only one worth having.
We worship the illusion of a single, flawless solution.
As if the people who make things up for a living—the designers, the engineers, the artists, the scientists—didn’t get there by tripping over their own bad ideas first.
The Science of Screwing Up
In the 1950s, a group of researchers made an incredible mistake.
They were trying to make a new kind of adhesive but accidentally created a weak, reusable glue that barely stuck to anything.
A disaster, right?
Wrong.
Someone, in a stroke of “What if I just leaned into the mistake?” brilliance, turned it into Post-it Notes.
That’s right—your ability to leave passive-aggressive reminders on the fridge is the direct result of a scientific oops.
Similarly, in 1928, a scientist left a petri dish out and accidentally discovered penicillin.
In 1968, a chemist trying to invent a super-strong adhesive instead created the weak, pressure-sensitive glue used in—you guessed it—Post-it Notes.
Yes. Post-it Notes were so good at being a mistake, they were discovered twice.
This is the wandering process in action.
It is not an elegant, straight-line march toward progress.
It is a drunk person staggering home, occasionally finding a shortcut, but more often tripping over their own feet.
The Business of Mistakes
If you’ve ever sat through a TED Talk given by a billionaire, you know that failing is very on-trend.
“Fail fast, fail often, fail forward,” they say.
Usually while standing in front of a slide that contains words like agile, disrupt, and synergy.
This is all very easy to say when your mistakes are being made with other people’s money.
It is much harder to embrace failure when it’s your own.
When the wandering feels more like being lost.
But the truth remains: wandering—erroring—is the only way to learn.
Not because failure is inherently good.
But because it is unavoidable.
The only people who never fail are the ones who never try.
And while that might sound peaceful, it is also deeply, painfully boring.
The best ideas, the best inventions, the best people?
All shaped by their errors.
So let’s wander.
Let’s screw up.
Let’s make something so completely, spectacularly wrong that it turns into something right.
And if all else fails…
Let’s at least invent a third version of Post-it Notes.
💬 Thought Experiment: What’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?
The kind that, in hindsight, led you somewhere unexpected—maybe even better than where you originally intended to go?
🧠 This musing is part of The Deductionists—a league of legendary minds unraveling the world’s absurdities with wit, logic, and a dash of mischief.
🎙 Listen to The Deconstructionists Podcast on Spotify or anywhere you get your podcasts.
Stay curious.