How to Stop Being a Perfectionist, My Favorite Mistake

Links from the Episode:

• Get 15% off your Creative Contracts purchase by using the code FPG or my affiliate link
• My Favorite Mistake Podcast Website
• The Mistakes that Make Us Book Website
• The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes Book *Amazon Affiliate Link*

My Favorite Mistake Description

Mark describes the show like this: We all make mistakes at work and in our career. The most successful people manage to learn from their mistakes. You’ll hear CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, and other interesting people discuss their favorite mistakes and what they learned, including how to prevent making the same mistakes again, or how to turn apparent mistakes into something positive.

The length of each episode is 45 minutes to an hour. The series is ongoing with new episodes available on Monday.

Creative Contracts

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Introduction to Mark Graban

Thank you for having me here. I get to wear a lot of different professional hats as they say, I’m an author. I’ve had books published and I’m working on another one right now. I’m a speaker, a consultant. I’ve been a podcaster since 2006. An entrepreneur, I guess I would wear all of those labels, but I’m an engineer with an MBA and I get to do a lot of different things, so I’m really fortunate.

How My Favorite Mistake Got Started

So I started this podcast September, 2020. It was partly a pandemic project looking for other stimulating things to do. I’ve been pretty fascinated by the idea of learning from mistakes for a while now. Kind of related mostly to professional circles in professional environments. I try to apply it in my personal life too and learn for myself how to stop being a perfectionist.

My favorite mistake is a way of interviewing people from all sorts of different professions and industries, kind of a broader set of people than I had interviewed in previous podcasts that are still ongoing, but they’re very niche.

I just get to ask each guest that question, what’s your favorite mistake? And it’s a business podcast. So sometimes there’s overlap between personal life and professional life, but you know, people are being vulnerable, they’re sharing a formative mistake from their career. And then more importantly, what did they learn from it?

It was there we were looking for stories where a mistake leads to something positive, because guess what? We all make mistakes. And there’s maybe ways of reacting to those mistakes that are more constructive, you know, instead of shaming ourselves or feeling bad about it forever. You know, try to learn from the mistake and try to prevent repeating the mistake is how to stop being a perfectionist and I think that’s what successful people seem to.

The favorite mistake is meant to emphasize the positive. It’s an intentionally open-ended question. How do you decide what a favorite is versus what I decide a favorite is. But I think the guests who come on set a good example for others of recognizing we’re all gonna make mistakes. We can try to prevent them, but they’re still gonna happen. And you know, we can show some grace to ourselves. We can take ownership of the decisions we made, instead of just blaming or pointing the finger at others. I think that leads to learning and growth and improvement. That’s, that’s what we try to celebrate on the podcast.

What to Expect from My Favorite Mistake

I mean, there’s this balance to be found, right? I mean, on one hand, mistakes are inevitable. We’re human. We’re all gonna make mistakes. At the same time, some mistakes are worse than others. So there’s a lot of stories in the podcast, and part of what I’m exploring in the book is when we expect to make mistakes or at least open the possibility of when we have an idea of like, oh, I could be wrong, then we maybe go test the idea in a small way, you know, kind of dip your toe in the water before you dive in. I think there’s something to be said for realizing when we make small mistakes and we can be honest about it, then we can prevent maybe really big, horrific, catastrophic mistakes. Those, those are the ones that are really worth preventing.

The Vibe of My Favorite Mistake

I try to be welcoming and positive again, like trying to embrace  what a lot of people call growth mindset. We’re all learning, we’re all improving. We all make mistakes. And I want people to learn how to stop being a perfectionist.

I hope it’s comforting. Like if anyone’s beating themself up for some sort of mistake and then you go and listen to a lot of people who are at the top of their profession and you realize, oh, they made mistakes too.

They almost lost their business, but they learned from it and they succeeded the second time, or they turned things around before that first company did go out of business. So the podcast isn’t one where necessarily we would try to directly learn from guests, like my second guest was a congressman who lost his first runoff election cuz he didn’t listen to his consultants. And that might be helpful if the listener planning on running for office, but that’s a very small percentage of the audience. So it’s more of like that meta example of, you know, there’s no shame in making mistakes.

The tone of the podcast is meant to be positive and we hope it sets a good example or provides some comfort for others to not beat themselves up for making mistakes.

Where to Find Mark, His Podcast & His Book

Yeah. So the home for the podcast on the web is myfavoritemistakepodcast.com. And then for the book that I’m writing, that’ll be out. I don’t know exactly when, but it’s still coming soon visit  Mistakesbook.com.

One of Mark’s Favorite Episodes

I think for your audience, I interviewed a children’s book author named Mark Pet, and I learned about him because his book has a great title that fits with my podcast, The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes, and he wrote it and illustrated it.

And it’s a book probably for younger elementary school children. But it’s a story about this girl who was proud that she never made mistakes. And then I won’t spoil exactly what happens, but long story short, without giving away all the fun details of the story. She realized people love her anyway and learned how to stop being a perfectionist. They didn’t love her because she was perfect. So it’s a great book about trying to battle perfectionism or, you know, it’s a good book about growth mindset.

So Mark Peck came on the podcast and told a story about his favorite mistake while he was starting his career. He was trying to be an editorial cartoonist for newspapers, and he was submitting samples to different newspapers. He got a letter back from a cartoonist who he really admired, one of the top in the field who basically kind of scolded him for like, I think, you know, you have to be careful about plagiarizing even unintentionally.

And Mark realized, oh gosh. He was really influenced by this cartoonist, and some of his work was a little too similar.

In a way, and this my words, not his, he wasn’t in any legal trouble…but in a way that feedback was a gift, right? The cartoonist could have just looked and said like, oh, who’s this kid? Oh, he is terrible. And just thrown it in the trash, you know? But getting that feedback was a wake up call for Mark of like you’ve gotta be careful not to be too influenced by others. I think the same is true as an author. And I just appreciate that he shared that story.

And, you know, he did some things to make sure that he wasn’t even inadvertently gonna be anywhere close to plagiarizing again. So he was great. I think the book is great, even for adults who can use a reminder of like, we don’t have to be perfect.

My Favorite Mistake & Little Ears

I would say generally yes, it is okay for little ears. I mean there’s a couple episodes that I’ve marked as being explicit because there were a couple mild curse words, it would be PG 13 at worst, on those episodes. But I try to be careful, like it’s not a show where we’re making a habit of cursing or dropping f-bombs.