The fear of making mistakes is the biggest mistake of all

I dedicate this article to all the people who have suffered because of wrong decisions I made, to those who suffered because I did not decide at all, and to those to whom I did not know how to apologize.

Children are not afraid of making mistakes. They fall, get back up, and try again with a naturalness that we, as adults, seem to have forgotten.

A child learning to walk falls dozens of times. No one looks at them and says:

“Well, I’m sorry, but I’d say you’re just not cut out for this walking thing.”

And yet, as we grow up, something changes.

Little by little, we begin to hear phrases that alter our relationship with error: be careful, don’t make mistakes, think before you act, and what if it goes wrong?

Without realizing it, we learn that making a mistake is no longer a natural stage of learning, but something to be avoided.
Making a mistake becomes a fault.

Thus, at a certain point in life, something curious happens: it is no longer the error that stops us.
It is the fear of the error.

From a psychological perspective, this fear is a rather sophisticated form of ego defense.

If I make a mistake, I might discover that I am not as good as I thought.
I might be judged by others.
I might lose something concrete: money, reputation, relationships.

Or I might simply realize that I made a wrong decision.

All possibilities that our brain tries to avoid with great efficiency.

So what do we do?

We wait.

We wait to be readier, more confident, better informed, more prepared. We wait for the right moment, as if sooner or later a sort of green light for life should appear.

The problem is that often that moment never comes.

And in the end, a curious thing happens: we no longer decide.
Life decides for us.

Lately, I find myself exactly within this tension.

I am seriously building my business as a freelancer. For a year and a half, it was almost a hobby, something growing on the margins of my professional life. Now it is no longer that. It has become a serious matter.

And I admit it without mincing words: I have a damn fear of making mistakes.

So I asked myself a very simple question: what would actually happen if I failed?

In my case, the consequences are quite clear. On one hand, it would be an emotional defeat; on the other, there would be invested time and money that I might not recover. These are not things to be thrown away lightly.

Then I asked myself if I could afford to fail.

The answer, if I’m honest, is probably no.

But immediately after, the opposite question also came to mind: can I afford not to try?

In the end, there are few alternatives: stay still or wait for life to decide for me.
And I have never liked this second option very much.

In my life, I have made difficult choices even when they were painful.

When I divorced, for example, I was the one who asked for it. It wasn’t the most convenient choice for me—I had fewer interests to protect than my ex-husband—and yet I chose anyway.

Finally closing a chapter that had been open for six years since the separation made me feel one very simple thing: capable of choosing.

Of course, every now and then I wondered how it would have gone if I had waited. Perhaps sooner or later he would have asked.

With hindsight, we are all geniuses, myself included. If I sat down, I could make an infinite list of “what ifs.”

But the truth is that in real life, it works differently.

Sometimes fear literally eats your gut, and there is no elegant strategy to manage it.

I usually do something very simple: I throw my heart, brain, liver, and gut over the obstacle and I choose.

I don’t know if it’s always right or wrong, but I know I can’t do it any other way.

And yet, every now and then, I also ask myself an uncomfortable question: is always choosing truly courage, or is it sometimes also an elegant way to avoid staying too long in front of fear?

Because the truth is that what really scares us is not just the error.

An error is a blow to identity.

It means admitting that we were wrong, that we hadn’t understood, that the decision made was not the right one.

And that is where the hardest part of all arrives: apologizing.

I know many people who find it enormously difficult to do so.

They beat around the bush, look for explanations, add a thousand phrases to soften the blow:
“but you know that’s just how I am,”
“I didn’t think that element was involved,”
“you know I love you.”

But screw that.

First, apologize.
Then, explain.

Learning to apologize completely changes your relationship with error.

When you know you can say “I was wrong,” error stops being a massive threat and returns to being what it was at the beginning of our lives: a transition, not a sentence. of the fear of making mistakes

Perhaps the problem is also something else.

We live in a society that seems to continuously organize an invisible competition: the Olympics of those who never make mistakes.

Too bad it’s a rigged race.

Because everyone makes mistakes.

It’s just that some hide it better than others.

Still others pretend not to care and smile even when they take certain hits to the teeth that would force them to book a dentist immediately.

But inside, it hurts just the same.

Perhaps we should stop chasing the idea of never making mistakes and instead learn something different: the art of failing well.

Failing well means: choosing anyway, taking responsibility for one’s decisions, apologizing when necessary, changing direction when we realize we have taken the wrong path, and then starting again.

It means having enough humility to start over and enough courage not to stay still.

Because in the end, the real question isn’t: what if I fail?

The question is another.

What if the fear of making mistakes were the biggest mistake of all?