Daily Bug Logs : Chronicling my mistakes
Hey everyone!
Today’s post is about something super close to my heart. For some time, I’ve been aware of two things
Most learning happens by making mistakes
Making mistakes is painful
I care a lot about learning and growing so around mid last year, I decided that I wanna change my relationship with making mistakes. You can call a mistake many different things. Faults, errors, wrong etc. And I knew that every time I make even the tiny mistake, a part of my brain will start chastising me. It will seek the worst ways to beat me up about the situation I am in and then go to town trying to tear me down.
This might not be true for other people, but I have noticed that for me, the cost of trying things out is not the “not knowing” but it is more acknowledging that I don’t know. Everyone (probably) has areas that they are okay making mistakes in and others that feel harder. And also it varies in degrees. I know that whatever error tolerance I have developed is an incidental thing on the course of me trying new things. It just felt like high time I did something about it.
Somewhere i had read that it takes about 18 months for a mindset shift to occur. And I knew that I wanted to shift my mindset around mistakes. It wasnt just a matter of habit, or behaviour, this felt like one of those things where I needed to be “the kind of person” who likes to make mistakes.
Another component for me is public authenticity. I think it really matters to me when I am able to be authentic to myself out in public. Especially when it is something that is “shame” related, putting light on it often is a good way to get rid of the shame. So combining these two things, I decided to start doing a Daily Bug log for 500 days. Over on twitter and threads.
I recently finished 250. That is halfway through. So here are some of the changes I have noticed in myself over the course of these past 250 logs.
I am not longer chastising myself when something goes wrong. Its incredible, but now I just look at the situation and think “oh what do I need to change for next time”. This isn’t the second thought or the third thought. This is now the default.
I am really looking after myself. Often my internal meter was focused on results, but these days, I am way more focused on “setting myself up for success”. Its a much more first principles approach, rather than forcing all the burden of success on the “me that executes” there is a lot more focus on planning and structuring things around me in a way that the focus is on finding what conditions lead to success.
I am actually looking at mistakes as bugs. And just like it happens in code, bugs can be features sometimes. So at times, things that might have previously seemed bad, like my slow emotional processing in certain situation, and just a performance mode turning on, I am now also able to see times when this is actually a feature.
I have more grace for others’ mistakes. As my relationship with mistakes has evolved, so has my irritability at others’ mistakes.
Reinforced belief that I truly can learn anything. If I just approach it the right way.
And this last one is the most important lesson. While I have always believed that everything in this world is learnable with the right approach, there is something unique about having a log of those infinitesimal changes in my mindset. Seeing how my thought process is changing/evolving and in real time see the impact on my life.
I also get GPT to run an analysis every 100 bugs, just to see what has happened, what areas I am under focused on, and what areas I am over focused on. Even GPT’s sentiment analysis of this whole project has been such a delight to see. I love getting deeper understanding of my own thinking, and this bug log project has been the perfect avenue for me to get that.
Hope you have had a fun month and I’ll see you next time.