Forgiving yourself for your mistakes.

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? So here is a kind of common situation that often happens. You make a mistake, someone catches your mistake, you get defensive because you're also mad at yourself from making the mistake, so you get a little defensive,

[00:00:33] then, you know, maybe you rethink it and you stop being defensive and you continue to be mad at yourself from making the mistake. This is a common problem, and it's one that I have too, and I have been trying to work on it, a lot actually. Because it's not a great look, you know, it's also not very productive if you make mistakes and you get defensive [00:01:00] and then you beat yourself up about it and can't forgive yourself.

[00:01:07] So I wanted to share the process that I have been working on to help myself not be like that. Is that the right phrase here? Anyway, I am not perfect. I am not able to follow the process even perfectly yet, but I can also tell you that I have definitely gotten way better in the last year or two, than I was before.

[00:01:36] Especially about the part where you have to forgive yourself for making mistakes. So true story: literally happened earlier this week. I saw uh, improvement. I saw an improvement that could be made to an open source project, one that I was using myself, and I decided to push an update very [00:02:00] quickly, uh, that would add that improvement because I was about to add it to my own code as well.

[00:02:07] And I told my friend who was the project maintainer about it, and my friend merged it right in, you know, I was like, okay, great. "Aurooba did this. Cool. I'm gonna merge it." And about four days later we discovered that I had made a mistake in my three lines of code that I had pushed – a very dumb mistake by the way that I should not have made, but I did because it was so quick and it happened.

[00:02:37] Well, we'll get to why it happened, but obviously when my friend told me about it, I was really mad. And then for a moment I even got defensive. I was like, well, why didn't you check my code? But you know, why didn't I check my code? Anyway, I had a moment of defensiveness and then [00:03:00] I took a pause and I said, wait, wait.

[00:03:03] Let's follow the process and my process is to set a timer for two minutes and vent. In this case, I vented in Slack and on Mastodon because I don't know, it made me feel better? And then after two minutes I said, all right, I am not gonna be mad anymore. The mistake happened, it has already been addressed.

[00:03:26] What can I do to move forward? And then I pulled out my notebook and I wrote down the solution. And what was the solution in this case? Aurooba, follow your process: test your code before publishing something, please? And I wrote that down, not because I'm gonna look at it, but because it helps me cement it more in my mind that this was the issue, here's the solution, that's what we're gonna do moving forward.

[00:03:58] And then [00:04:00] I would like to tell you that I stopped thinking about it, but clearly I didn't because here I am recording a podcast episode about it. But I felt like it was a good lesson and I will stop thinking about it starting after this episode We are human. We make mistakes. I make mistakes. It is okay.

[00:04:25] The important thing is to find solutions, move forward, and do our best not to make those mistakes again. And overthinking and replaying the situation does not help. So that's what I'm thinking about today.

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.