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

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.