Why You Should Value Your Mistakes, with High-Wire Artist Philippe Petit | Big Think

less than 1m read

·Nov 4, 2024

If I had a university to direct, and in some ways I hope that one day to have my own foundation where I will teach people things, there will be a course in mistakes. In the sense that I think we discard mistakes; we brush them aside. In a non-creative way, mistakes are our best teachers.

When I make a mistake, there are two things parallel happening in my head, in my heart, and consciously I try to find the why of the situation. Very consciously, I observe what happened, or, you know, recall what happened, and find sometimes the myriads of details that I didn’t pay attention to.

Or sometimes it’s as simple as I was not focusing enough, you know. If I cut a piece of wood with a saw and not really focused, and the blade of the saw jumps and, you know, starts scratching my finger. What a great lesson! Because I maybe didn’t observe how the fibers of the wood were; maybe I didn’t sharpen the saw correctly. Maybe I was saying hello to a friend passing by instead of concentrating on the curve, you know, the width of the blade.

It’s very easy to observe a mistake and then to backtrack and to find out what the causes of that are. So I am always very interested. It’s like solving a problem, you know. It’s interesting for me to investigate what went wrong.

Evolution through variation and natural selection

Mr. Freeman, part 63

View All

Multiplying 10s | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy

Let’s multiply 40 times 70. So, 40 times we have the number 70. So, we could actually list that out, the number 70, 40 different times and add it up, but that’s clearly a lot of computation to do, and there’s got to be a faster way. So, another way is …

Representing systems of any number of equations with matrices | Precalculus | Khan Academy

In a previous video, we saw that if you have a system of three equations with three unknowns, like this, you can represent it as a matrix vector equation. Where this matrix, right over here, is a three by three matrix that is essentially a coefficient mat…

Life of Muhammad and beginnings of Islam part 1 | World History | Khan Academy

Now going to give an overview on the beginnings of Islam. Regardless of whether you are part of an Islamic culture, you are a practicing Muslim, or you believe in the Islamic Traditions, it’s valuable to learn about the beginnings of Islam because today n…

LearnStorm Growth Mindset: Animation Director on setting goals

My name is Lisa Labraccio. I’m 32 years old. I am an animation director at Ted Ed. I’ve always wanted to do animation, so it just, at whatever point in high school, when they tell you to start looking at colleges and what you might, where you might want t…

How To Invest $500 Per Month

What’s up, you guys? It’s great here! So, I realized in many of my videos I talked about investing ridiculous sums of money or putting 20% down to buy real estate, which could work out to be like six figures in cash. But I wanted to take a different appro…

Calculating change in spending or taxes to close output gaps | AP Macroeconomics | Khan Academy

So we have two different economies depicted here. On the left, we have an economy where its short-run equilibrium output is above its full employment output, and so it has a positive output gap. It might seem like a good thing that your economy is just do…

Why You Should Value Your Mistakes, with High-Wire Artist Philippe Petit | Big Think

More Articles