The Benefits of Making Mistakes

Mistakes are normally seen as a problem. An annoying part of life that we have to experience and just learn to get over.

When I make a mistake in my drawing, I feel like I have done something wrong. I feel bad, I correct the mistake and hope that I don’t make it again in the future.

What if this is the wrong way of thinking?

What if mistakes are beautiful things that we should cherish?

I began thinking about this after I stumbled across Neil Gaiman’s book, ‘Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change The World’. It’s a beautiful book, illustrated on every page by Chris Riddell. I found it in a childrens’ book store though it contains advice that I definitely needed to hear as an adult.

Gaiman proposes a different way of understanding mistakes.

To be clear, I’m specifically talking about the arts. In some instances, mistakes have horrific consequences and definitely should not be aimed for!

But back to the book.

What I’m currently taking from it is to make mistakes. Not to learn from our mistakes, not to correct them, nor overcome them, but to actively make them.

Mistakes are the goal here, not a side line thing that you have to put up with in the pursuit of perfection.

Let me explain the genius of this…

When you search online for ‘making mistakes’, you usually get titles like this:

• ‘How to get over making a mistake’

• ‘How to learn from your mistakes’

• ‘Why it’s OK to make mistakes’

This implies that mistakes are not good things, and that we have to learn from them so that we don’t make them again in the future.

What constitutes a mistake anyway? A broken rule? A word misspelled? Anatomy drawn out of proportion in a life drawing class?

Mistakes are just us breaking other people’s rules.

And is that not how art progresses? By breaking the rules and regulations of the previous generation of artists? If we always adhered to the rules of Cubism, we would only ever have Cubism and no new art would have been made.

If mistakes, in regards to art, are simply us breaking the rules of the previous genre of art, isn’t that precisely what we need to make new and exciting artwork? Don’t get me wrong, rules are good. They give us guidance and wisdom from those who came before us. But in essence, this is all that they are. The rules can be broken and nothing bad happens when they are.

It is limiting to create art based on what other people have defined as right or wrong. So perhaps what we originally viewed as a mistake is just new and exciting art.

So, really… breaking all, or at least some, of the rules that are already in existence allows you to make something new and beautiful.

Before I believed that good art was made because of my mistakes, I thought I had to put up with the uncomfortable feeling making a mistake gave me. This is because I had learnt that mistakes where things I should not do. I no longer believe this.

I no longer wish to ‘get over’ my mistakes or find a way to be comfortable with them. I want to relish in them. I want to make big, beautiful mistakes. I want to be proud of them.

Seeing mistakes as something I ought to aspire to has freed some of the creative constraints in my mind. Neil Gaiman ends his book perfectly to this point, ‘Make interesting, amazing, glorious, fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.’

How do you feel about making mistakes? Let me know in the comments!