Error time

Learning from mistakes can be key to personal, professional growth

There’s a lot to learn from being wrong, says Bryan Powell, a former high school teacher and current tour guide in Washington, D.C. “I used to tell my students that all great things started from a mistake, that great actions, great inventions, great pieces of literature and art — they all began after one or two big errors or a couple of bad rough drafts,” says the 37-year-old father of two.

For Powell, that mistake happened during his first year out of the University of Maryland when he was “doing grunt work” for a large insurance company in Virginia. “I basically allowed a client to make a fraudulent claim, a really dumb, obviously phony claim. It took a few court dates and a lot of legal work to get my company out of the mess,” he says.

Powell says he was let go soon after “They didn’t really beat around the bush or try to make it sound like there was more to the story than there was,” he says. “They basically said ‘you messed up, you cost us a lot of money and you’re out.’ ”

Finding a spark

Powell says he moved back home to sulk for a few weeks until his mother decided she’d had enough. “It’s funny how our moms end up being these great catalysts in our lives. I know I would have eventually got my act together but the vision of my 5-foot mother standing over my bed at 6:30 on a Monday morning, telling me to do something with my life was about as much of a punch to the gut as I needed.”

Powell says he took an immediate job with a local yogurt shop and began looking for another job in the insurance industry when he had an epiphany. “I realized I hated insurance. I hated having to deal with people who had experienced something bad in their lives and who were looking for a helping hand, and I hated not always being able to provide that helping hand,” he says.

The other thing Powell realized was that he actually enjoyed his 20 hours a week at the yogurt place. “I loved the direct interaction with the customers, I loved talking to my co-workers and I loved the idea of providing an actual product,” he says.

Powell didn’t find the food industry particularly attractive so he went back to the career services office at the University of Maryland and discovered that what he really wanted to do was teach. “I took an accelerated program and began teaching within 15 months,” he says. “I liked my day-to-day responsibilities as a teacher. I liked the students and I liked the idea of this transfer of knowledge. It wasn’t as tangible as yogurt but it was definitely a real thing.”

Think it through

Ellen Ryder, a career consultant in Arlington, Texas, says most of today’s employees can learn a lot if they think over the cause and effect of their mistakes. “The thing to consider is a pattern of mistakes,” Ryder says. “If you’re consistently making errors and you’re normally a dependable individual, you’re probably not interested enough in your job to do good work.”

Ryder says employees who messed up a project should pinpoint where they went wrong. “I once worked with someone who had a million great ideas and could organize a team and keep everyone on the same page, and yet her projects always faded out in the end. Even though they started out like gangbusters, someone else would have to come in and fix whatever went wrong. One time, she canceled a presentation with our CEO because she wasn’t ready. That’s a no-no, especially if the CEO is coming in from the San Francisco office for the day” Ryder says.

The issue, according to Ryder, was that her friend would get so consumed with the minutiae that she didn’t know how to bring everything together in the end. “She wasn’t a closer,” Ryder says. “She didn’t know how to finish.”

After discussing it with a manager, Ryder says her friend enrolled in a few project management classes and created an elaborate index-card system to track her progress, from start to finish — “the key word being ‘finish,’” says Ryder. “It changed everything about her approach. She really made a transformation.”

Powell, now in his third career act as a tour guide, can relate. “I really enjoyed teaching but I realized was that what I really enjoyed was speaking,” he says. “I didn’t like grading papers and giving tests. I just liked standing in front of the class, leading a discussion. I’d do it for 12 hours a day if I could.”

So he does, just not in a classroom. Powell says he didn’t have to endure another big error to switch paths. He just knew it was time to do something different. “Teaching is a great metaphor for life,” Powell says. “You always get a revision and you don’t turn it back in until it’s ready.”