Learning to Embrace Mistakes

When I was studying in high school, I came across a quote by Karl Popper, a philosopher and

academic, that really caught my attention. He once said:

"Avoiding mistakes is a narrow-minded ideal. If we don’t dare face those challenges that are so

difficult as to make the error almost inevitable, knowledge will not be developed. It is from our

more daring theories, including those that are wrong, that we learn the most. No one can avoid

making mistakes, but the important thing is to learn from them".

Image by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Popper’s words sound reasonable, yet fully embracing the idea of learning from errors and living with that mindset is far from easy. I am in that period of life, the 30s, where I find myself questioning my life and the choices I make. I am a PhD student in Neuroscience at the University of Verona, Italy, and I often end up asking: "Am I on the right career path? Was this lab experience good enough for my growth? Should I study more to acquire that skill?"

Social media does not help me in this thinking loop. When I scroll through my feed, I am constantly exposed to the apparent successes of others, which makes me focus even more on what I feel I am lacking. I start comparing my path to theirs, replaying my decisions in my head, and questioning whether I am doing enough or moving fast enough. Over time, this comparison turns into rumination and leaves me feeling frustrated, inadequate, and increasingly afraid of making the “wrong” choice.

Sharing these thoughts with my friends, I realised something else: many people in my generation struggle deeply with making choices in many aspects of life. We are haunted by questions like, what if I’m wrong? What if I have bad consequences from this decision? What if this is not the best possible option?

It seems like we are unable to trust the process. We found ourselves with too many options to choose from, yet we are expected to make the “right” one straight away, and a backup plan, in case of failure. Understandably, this state generates anxiety, and I see it everywhere around me: a shared fear of making mistakes, of choosing “wrong”, and failing.

But what if we are looking at mistakes in the wrong way?

Errors are a part of knowledge

As a researcher working in a lab, I can say that error is not an exception. It is the rule. A scientific theory is, by definition, an idea that can be proven wrong. Science progresses not by avoiding mistakes, but by actively putting ideas in conditions where they might fail. In this sense, error is not the opposite of knowledge; it is how knowledge grows.

The same is true for the human brain. Our brains learn through trial and error. It constantly builds internal models of the world, tests them against reality, and updates them when they do not work.

Our brain processes errors in different ways:

Errors catch our attention. When we are confident that we know something but later discover we are wrong, this is called a "high-confidence error". In these moments, areas of the brain involved in decision-making, like the medial frontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, act like an alarm, telling our brain there is a mismatch between what we believe in and what we discover. Interestingly, this response does not happen only when we are wrong, but also when we are unexpectedly right. In these moments of contradiction, the brain is surprised and marks the feedback as important, prompting us to pay closer attention.

Errors challenge our brains to make an effort. When we make a mistake and then get the right answer, our brain has to work harder to "delete" the wrong information and "save" the new one. This extra effort, managed by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in conflict resolution, monitoring, and control, makes the memory stronger and long-lasting than if we had just passively read the right answer.

The fear of making mistakes

Modern life puts enormous emphasis on performance, speed, and efficiency. We are constantly stimulated, constantly responding, and constantly judged. Consequently, intelligence is often measured as doing the right thing at the right time, as fast as possible.

Image by Timon Studler on Unsplash

But learning takes time and requires both attention and reflection. Indeed, the brain does something more special than merely responding to stimuli: it shapes who we are and the capacities that make us human, such as contemplation, imagination, and dreaming. When we are forced to operate on a fast-paced timeline like instant clicks, notifications, and rewards, we sacrifice depth for speed. Our attention span erodes, and we become trapped in stimulus–response loops. And this conflict between how our brain actually works and how we are asked to function generates anxiety of failing.

This is where rumination appears. In my clinical practice during my doctorate in psychology, I routinely saw people stuck in their recurring thoughts. Rumination gives us the illusion of solving problems, but in reality, it is just repetitive, anxiety-driven thinking that intensifies our fear of making mistakes. For many, especially young adults like me, making a mistake feels like a judgment: What happens if I fail? What kind of person am I?

We do not realise that making errors means being alive and the only way to face it is to do it and learn to fall. Short-term mistakes are frequent and necessary to avoid long-term errors. Not moving, not choosing, not taking a risk: this is where real failure lies.

Freedom begins when we accept being fallible

We often have a double standard when it comes to mistakes: we hide our own and judge others’. At the same time, we live in a culture that celebrates success stories without revealing the numerous wrong turns that led to them. But how much freedom would we gain if we accepted our own mistakes?

Image by Melanie Stander on Unsplash

We need to accept that mistakes are a fundamental part of life, a natural aspect of being human. Accepting error means accepting pain, uncertainty, and vulnerability. It means trusting that growth also comes from unpredictable mistakes and that controlling everything cannot be the solution for our need to perform well.

Ultimately, the most precious experience in life comes from something we did not plan and from our ability to start again after making a mistake, as Popper once said.