This made me grin at least.
At the same time, if you get better and faster at recognizing your mistakes, that alone can help improve performance. I remember talking to my instructor a few years back as I switched from skiing to snowboarding. Her observation about both sports was that you could think of them as a series of controlled recoveries.
It’s only within the mythology of Soviet style planning (whether encountered during the Cold War or in a corporate environment ), that mistakes can’t be tolerated. If you’re quick and agile enough, you can recover from those small mistakes that you make every day. Step one in recovering from mistakes is recognizing them as quickly as possible (Step 0 is given yourself permission to make the mistakes you’re going to make regardless).
On Experience. On Experience —
“Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.”
— Franklin P. Jones(via The Quotations Page) [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]