Don't Be Afraid To Mess Up

Too many artists are scared to make a mistake; this a fear that they need to get over. Most people are nervous about making a mistake in public; there's a reason "public speaking" is one of our biggest fears. It's simply because we as humans are competitive and making a mistake shows a flaw; no competitor worth his salt likes to show a flaw because it can be a way for our competition to take advantage of and thus win. 

It doesn't matter if we are in combat, in sports, or in our studios, we don't want our competition to have an edge over us. 

However, making mistake can also give us a chance to make amazing discoveries. Consider the CUBE computer: Computer scientists use chess to tell how smart their machines are; the better it does against a human competitor the smarter it is. Well, someone decided to turn off the move check system; the reasoning was that the computer wouldn't make a mistake and the human was too good to make a mistake, and so all it was doing was wasting memory. So of course the computer started cheating. 

Yeah, you read that right: CUBE started cheating because one of the human players made a mistake and moved a piece wrong. And won. 

CUBE saw it and went, "Whoa. Wait a sec. I can do THAT?" 

After that CUBE would occasionally move its pieces wrong on purpose. And the human players noticed. They told the programmers, and so the programmers checked the game history. And they were amused. They also re-instituted the move checker almost immediately. 

But the key here is that a mistake was made (the move-check was turned off) and we made an amazing discovery (computers can cheat). Scientists do this all the time; it's well-known that we owe the vulcanization of rubber due to an engineer falling asleep, and that's a major innovation. We see the same in ever endeavor which humans are involved, from science to art to cooking. 

So don't be afraid to make mistakes. Sure, you will make some major mistakes that are going to be embarrassing; but that's just part of the process. You need to make mistakes in order to learn; only be figuring out where the mistake happened can you learn to not make the same mistake again. But...you can also make some amazing discoveries along the way. So don't be afraid to mess up; you need to mess up to get better.