The Value of Mistakes

By Jeffrey Agrell

Did he say value of mistakes? Has he been nipping at the cooking sherry? What possible value could a mistake have? Don’t we spend our musical lives in a relentless pursuit of mistake-free performance?

That’s right, I know what you’re thinking. But hear me out. There is a method to this mad thesis.

What do you feel when you make a ‘mistake’ when you playing – either practicing or performing?

Is this a trick question? Yes, given conventional thought patterns, but it shouldn’t be. Usual answers to this question include a garden of reactions such as disappointment, anger, alarm, agony, guilt, frustration, distraction, panic, tension, nervousness, and so on.

Here’s what you should feel after making a mistake:

Nothing.

Did he say nothing? (It’s a definite on the cooking sherry!) So I’m not supposed to care about how I play? So I can just miss every note and that’s just fine? Huh? Huh?

Whoa, horse. Consider this: making mistakes is not about feeling something. Neither is not making mistakes. Rather than looking at a mistake as a crime that we perpetrate against ourselves, our instruments, and our art, how about a more useful definition of what a mistake is:

A mistake is information.

Mistakes can have much value for us if we acknowledge it and make use of this information. Conversely, our progress on the instrument will be severely curtailed if we substitute guilt, denial, or panic for learning from this information. Simply said, a mistake is an unexpected result that tells the player that something needs changing in some way. When (not if) such surprises happen, the proper reaction is isolation of the problem, analysis of possible causes, and construction of possible solutions. Not irritation or tension.

By the same token, when things go exactly as planned, this is also information; it means remember (kinesthetically) what this feels like and do it again the same way next time.

Remember the quote from the Kipling poem If?

If you can meet Triumph and Disaster and treat these two imposters just the same…

It may come as a surprise, but playing ‘perfectly’ can be hazardous, too. Have you ever been halfway through a concert or recital and had the thought, “Hey! So far I haven’t missed a single- oh, crap!”. Pride from perfection is just as much a distraction from focus on the job at hand as any negative emotional reaction to a mistake. Either kind of reaction is an involvement of the ego, and personal egos are not useful in getting a job done.

Sometimes the biggest difference between pro and amateur players is that pros have learned the ability of instant amnesia – when something unexpected happens, let go of it, stay in the present moment, maintain calm and acute focus and not let prior results (perfection or imperfection) influence how you play what comes next. (Amnesia is perhaps not the proper word, as it implies denial. The answer is to quickly store information on unplanned occurrences in a ‘clam file’ for attention the next day; during performance is not the time to digest the information the way you must do during practice sessions.)

This same process holds true in many professional pursuits, notably sports. As they say, in golf, the only thing that will screw up your swing more than a bad shot is a good shot: the problem is trying to force a good shot because you just shot well/poorly rather than approaching each shot with dispassionate focus and calm regardless of the previous results. Written in big letters on the blackboard in my office is the complete list of the most important aspects of performing: 1. Calm (no tension) 2. Focus and alertness and 3. Ego detachment.

Play. Observe closely. Isolate the problem. Make an adjustment. Try again. Simple as that, and removing ego reaction from mistakes saves much wear and tear on the nervous and circulatory systems as well as making the learning process much more efficient.

William Westney has written a splendid book all about this subject entitled The Perfect Wrong Note. He says that honest mistakes are a natural part of the learning process, and that “if you take the time to immediately process the mistake, your learning will be pure and lasting.” He goes so far as to say that it is a good idea to produce as many honest mistakes as possible for the sake of producing a large amount of information that we can use in solving our problems. “They save us a lot of time,” he says. “They reveal the underlying specific reason for a particular glitch.”

Children are able to assimilate the world so quickly because they don’t worry about making mistakes. They proceed with a spirit of endless adventure, persistence, and enthusiasm. Adults learn much more slowly because they have heavy ego attachment to results and have been schooled to value product (perfection) over the process that allows them to learn efficiently, which includes making lots of mistakes and learning from them.

Westney is careful to distinguish between honest mistakes, where attentive exploration is a natural part of efficient learning, and careless mistakes that stem from inattentiveness, where we may not even notice our mistakes and/or where we don’t process the information we receive from mistakes. In these cases, mistakes are likely to lead to no progress and bad habits. Here, such a player may rationalize sloppy playing with vague spronouncements:
-“Oops. Well, that never happened before.”
-“Hey, nobody’s perfect.”
-“Well, I missed a couple things, but it was pretty good on the whole.”
-“I don’t know what happened. I can play this piece.”

As Westney says, this is just narcissistic thinking: justifying one’s efforts and denying the useful information to be gained from careful identification and close examination of the mistakes. Most useful is gleaning specific information from a missed note: instead of saying, ‘I messed up,’ say ‘I aimed too low on that Bb.’ A need to keep a highly polished ego leads to denial of anything that doesn’t fit the picture and thus drastically curtails learning. Westney gives the example of why Korean women learn much faster than men: women have lower status, and are thus ‘allowed’ to make mistakes. He quotes a Korean woman: “When a man makes mistakes, it is an affront to his masculine pride. I could make a fool of myself, so it was easy to learn English.”

Much of our performance anxiety stems from our nonacceptance of making mistakes, as William Scharnberg pointed out in “The Importance of Failure in Artistic Development.” He says

The mechanical aspects of preparation seldom pose insurmountable obstacles to efficient practice. The more difficult takes is often dealing with our self-esteem (self-image, self-concept).

Scharnberg recognizes that society builds in pressures to succeed (conquer failure) from early on and at all costs. Since trial and error is a natural part of the learning process, we need to face and embrace the mistakes and ‘failures’ that we encounter along the way, and learn from them, use them to do better the next time.

The measure of a performance is not that absolute note perfection is achieved. Performances are chances to validate how we are progressing on the continuum of artistic development, which includes alert, focused, and ego-free playing and learning from our mistakes.

Here’s a revised version of the original (trick) question: how should you feel after a practice session where you were aware of your mistakes and you remained calm, curious, and ego-free as you eagerly used the information they contained to inform and refine your efforts?

Very good indeed, I think!