In chess, a blunder is a mistake that no one can excuse. Even one blunder and you’re probably going to lose.
In our vigilance to avoid blunders, sometimes we try to eliminate mistakes as well.
For understandable reasons, we spend a lot of time trying to avoid blunders and minimizing mistakes. But if that’s all we do, we’ve given up the chance to do something magical.
If you’re working on the frontier, if you’re leading, creating or inventing, you’ve signed up for mistakes. That’s the price of innovation.
After the fact, it’s easy for an attempt at great work to look like nothing but a blunder. But it might simply be a mistake that we can learn from.