Mary: Okay, so, um, let's talk about mistakes. I thought you do a really good job answering this question.
Seth: Thanks, Mary. I do make lots of mistakes.
Mary: Do you think that making mistakes is important? An important part of the learning process?
Seth: Yes. I believe it's a very painful but important part of the learning process. Um, I have had to learn another language, and I've taught another language before, and the biggest hurdle I felt personally to get over was trying just doing it, um, and then allowing myself to make those mistakes. I'm a person that likes to learn it perfectly, and then try to do it perfectly. So it was hard for me to just try. Just try to speak this language. Just try to conjugate these verbs, try to put these phrases together. Um, in its when I finally did started letting myself fail and being corrected that I was able to succeed at learning language. I found this also with math, um, learning math. I had to try and make mistakes, get it, get it looked at, reviewed, and then do it again until I got it right. And that helped me with also learning accounting. I'm an accountant and, um, you learn accounting by doing. You go to school and and get all the school work. But it's when you actually practice it and you make mistakes that, um you learn from those mistakes, I I just I feel like we learn a lot when we make mistakes.
Mary: I think to that, um the quality that I imagine you're developing when you do make a mistake, which seems counter intuitive, is courage. Sometimes when we feel like we're really good at something, we don't have to be brave because we just have it figured out, right?
Mary: That we kind of have the boundaries set for us that we realized like, 'Oh, I've got this!'.' This is really easy!'. 'I don't have trouble with this!', but it's when we're uncertain and we know that we probably won't do it right. And so we're in this place where we can either not try it all or try. But the chances of us failing are really high, because we, um basically have no clue what we're doing. And that's why I associate the word courage with it, because we just have to be brave that it's kind of scary to make that mistake. And but making the mistake is where you grow because you learn things about, um, whatever it is you didn't know. So in this case language, maybe you need to learn to, conjugate the verb correctly. But if you don't say it wrong, you won't be corrected to do it right. Or maybe you're using an idiomatic expression incorrectly, but you don't really know how to use it, so you have to say it incorrectly so that somebody can help you. And then now you know and you may not remember it, but at least you've taken that step and done something a little bit scary so that you can open up your knowledge. You can expand that more, and that's a really that's where fluent speakers of another language that's where they become fluent because they are brave and they take risks and they make a lot of mistakes until they are getting it right more often than they're getting it wrong.
Seth: I like that. Thanks.
