Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #370 - Learning from Mistakes

Episode Date: September 30, 2016

Mark talks about how one can best learn from their mistakes.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is a recommendation from my podcast. I mean, I'm sorry, a recommendation from my blog for a podcast topic. So they wanted me to talk about learning from mistakes. So I've already done a podcast on mistakes and the value of mistakes where I talk about how mistakes aren't so bad. So today is going to be sort of building off of that. I'm not going to talk so much why mistakes are valuable, though that'll come up. I'm going to talk about, okay, you've made mistakes. How do you learn from your mistakes?

So very quickly, just a quick recap on mistakes. You can listen to my whole mistake podcast for the 30-minute version of this. But basically, mistakes are valuable because they're very good teaching tools. And the thing I talked about in my mistake podcast is success breeds repetition. When something works, it teaches you, well, do that again. That worked. But when you make a mistake, it teaches you that, okay, I did something wrong. Something didn't work.

Let me figure out how I could do it better. When you make a mistake, it teaches you that, okay, I did something wrong. Something didn't work. Let me figure out how I could do it better. And mistakes cause you to look inside, to think about, like, what could I do to make it better? How did I go wrong? What happened? So the key I want to talk about today is I want to actually talk about how does one learn from mistakes. Because the nature of what I do is an iterative process. When I'm making a magic set, I'm iterating. And what I'm doing is I'm making something.

I have ideas. I try them. I turn them into cards, me and my team. Then we playtest them and discover what's working and what's not working. And things that aren't working, we then change to make better. So on some level, what I do is make mistakes all the time. And once again, really all a mistake is is something that doesn't work out. It doesn't necessarily mean that your thought process for doing it was wrong.

You know, so here's a couple of myths on mistakes that first help you with learning about how to get better from mistakes. Number one is the idea that mistakes happen because you did something wrong. No, not at all. I mean, they can, but a lot of times what happens is you are trying something. Like when I'm iterating and I'm trying new things, I'm trying things. Now sometimes some of those things don't work out. You know, they ended up being mistakes. But they weren't mistakes in the sense that there wasn't the smart play to try that. I think there is this real sense that making mistakes is an error, is a problem. real sense that making mistake is an error, is a problem. And so lesson number one to learn from mistakes is mistakes are a natural part of the process. That when you are trying to create

something or whatever, when you're doing anything, when you're learning, you are going to try things and not all of them are going to work. And the nature of how we learn is by trying. Because I think what happens is if you're afraid of making a mistake, it keeps you from trying. And that the most important thing if you want to learn from your mistakes is the first thing is understand mistakes are part of the process. Mistakes happen. They're not a bad thing.

They're not something to be ashamed of. They're not something to hide. And they're not something to avoid. You know, I think one of the big things is some people are so cautious of making a mistake that they never stretch, that they never try anything outside their comfort zone. And the reality is that a lot of the most awesome things in life come from trying and failing

and learning and working through that. And if you never do anything, when you never make any mistakes, you never break through that period. And the period past it, the period where you learn, the period where you grow, is very valuable.

But in order to grow, in order to learn, mistakes just aren't... I'm not even saying the mistakes happen. Mistakes are an important part of the process. And you need to accept that. You need to understand that. That one of the things that I think makes for a talented artist or a talented creator of any kind is the willing

to push past. Like I've done stuff. I've done many stuff where I've made it and people all around me are like, oh, that's a horrible idea. You shouldn't do that. But in my gut, I believed in it. And you know what? Some of the times they were right. I shouldn't have done that. But I did it. I learned from it. And things got better because of it. One of the things I often say, I've talked about this before, is what makes a good playtest? A good playtest is where you learn something.

So if I make some cards and it plays horribly, it is the most unfun game of magic I've ever played. That's a good playtest because I learned something. The bad playtests are where like you walk away from the test going, well, it wasn't really exciting, but it wasn't bad. It's like, like you don't learn anything. When I do a playtest and things go horribly wrong, guess what? My next playtest will be radically different. I have learned something from that experience. So the first thing I want people to understand is embrace mistakes as part of the process. They're not something to be feared. They're not something to be avoided. They're not something that you should shy away from. And don't make decisions, especially in the artistic, especially when you're trying to create something, don't make decisions on the idea of, oh no, I don't want to do something wrong.

Some of the best ideas, in my mistakes podcast, I just went through, for example, a lot of famous things in the world that came apart as part of mistakes. You know, whether it be the post-it note or the chocolate chip cookie or penicillin, there's a lot of really classic examples of things that the person who set out, who made them or discovered them, that wasn't what they were trying to do, but along the way they realized something. And that moves us into the second lesson. So lesson number one is respect the mistakes that are part of the process. Don't be afraid of mistakes. Don't be scared of mistakes.

But be aware, the goal is, once you understand and learn from it, don't repeat the mistake. Don't make the same mistake. Well, I mean, sometimes you do because you're trying to learn other things. But as a general rule, keep making new mistakes. Don't keep making the same mistake. When you learn from something, understand it, and then try to do new myth you know try to do new things which will generate new mistakes but never ever be afraid I think the biggest problem is when people keep making the same mistake that's the problem when you don't learn from your mistakes mistakes are okay not learning from your mistakes that's the problem although I don't

blame the mistakes I blame you you need to learn from what your mistakes you need to learn why something went wrong. Okay. So understand the mistakes are part of the process. Okay. But next thing is to understand how you get to use mistakes. What is the value of mistakes? So for this one, one of the things, the tale I will tell, I told this tale, I might've told this tale before, but it's a good tale. So Warren Wyman, I think I've told this tale before, but Warren Wyman used to do security at Wizards way back when. And he was in the Army. And he told the story once of he had a fire,

I'm not sure of the technical term, but it's firing, you shoot high in the air and it falls, not a catapult, but a military device where you're shooting ammo and you're, so the idea was you would shoot, it would land, you'd see where it would land. And then you would adjust because you're kind of, to hit your target, you'd see where you landed, make adjustments and see, and you would slowly gauge by where you were hitting. And one of the things they taught them is if you overshoot you better undershoot the next time that there's more to learn from being on the opposite end that if I'm trying to hit something and I go long and then I

go long again it's a lot harder for me to understand where I went wrong but if I go long and then I go short I have a much better range to figure out where I need to be. And that one of the things about doing design, I think people think that when I do a design, I'm trying to make every version of my file the perfect version. It's not what I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do is every time I do a playtest, I want to learn from that playtest. So one of the things we do often, and we do this in design and development, is you will skew your file towards something so you can learn about it. Very common, for example, early in design that I will, like usually when we start mechanics, I cycle them across all the colors. Not because I believe they'll be in all the colors, sometimes they will, sometimes they won't, but because I

just want to experience it, you know, and I tend to put it at a higher as fan than I expect it to be at, meaning I want it to show up more, and I make sure that all the cards are playable. I do what I call the flat power level. I just make sure that every card's at a playable power level. And the idea is what I want when I'm doing early designs, I just want to experience things. I want to play stuff and get a sense of it.

And it doesn't matter, like, the first thing I'll do is I'll just play with a lot of it. I just want to experience the thing it is. And from that, I will learn. Usually, a lot of the time, not all the time, but a lot of times, like, oh, there's just too much. Okay, well, guess what? There's too much.

I can lower it. But if there's not enough, the reason you overshoot there instead of undershoot is if there's too much, you experience it. If there's not enough, you might not even experience it. And the earliest part of design is experience. I mean, basically part of iteration is you go broad and then go narrower and narrower and narrower. So the first thing I'm doing when I'm trying to understand mechanic is, is the mechanic fun? Is there something about the mechanic?

Is it something that people are going to want to do? Before I get to all the nitty gritty of how it works and like, is this something that's fun at all? And so early design, I'm doing a lot of pushing in directions. A lot of times where I know is fundamentally going to be wrong. You know, I'm putting things at a higher as-fan than they will ever be. Putting in more colors than I expect it'll, You know, putting things at a higher as-fan than they will ever be. Putting in more colors than expected. You know, like, my goal is not to be... I think a lot of times when people think of playtesting, they think of it this way.

What they think of is, oh, okay, I'm going to make a set, and then each time I'm going to try to get the set closer to the right place to be. That I'm... the set is 2%, you know, good. Now it's 4% good. Now it's 8%. At some point, I want to get to 100% and it's 100% good, I can stop. That's not really how the best design works. What the best design does is it tries something, it recognizes strengths and weaknesses, and then it plays up the strengths to figure out where in the, like, where the meat lies in the strengths. And sometimes you even repeat weaknesses to figure out, the meat lies in the strengths. And sometimes you even repeat weaknesses to figure out,

do you understand the weaknesses correctly? Is there some value there? And a lot of what you want to do is you are not trying to replicate the perfect set. You are trying to make the thing that's going to teach you the most. And that's a really important thing. This is my number two lesson about mistakes is, mistakes are a valuable important thing. This is my number two lesson about mistakes is mistakes are a valuable teaching tool. They are not something that you only stumble into. They are something you can

consciously use. And what I mean by that is it is okay to push in a direction where you anticipate finding the mistake. That I think a lot of people are like, oh, you want to avoid mistakes. The last thing you ever want to do is make a mistake. And I say, no, no, no, no. A lot of how you learn in the creative process is by pushing in directions. And in some level, like for example, one of the sayings is, you know, if you never make a mistake, you are not pushing yourself enough. And what that means is that mistakes are the guideline where you go, oh, I've crossed the line. But if you've never crossed the line, how do you know where the line is? Like if you're playtesting something and nothing ever breaks, if nothing ever goes wrong, then my argument there is, wow, are

you giving up a large swath of area you could under the guise of, I don't ever want to make a mistake? Because what happens is, maybe there's all this interesting space you could be exploring, but the fear of making the mistake is keeping you from getting anywhere close to the line. There's nothing wrong with crossing the line. In fact, one of the great things about crossing the line is it teaches you where the line is. It's good to know where the line is. And remember, one of the things I love to say is we play a lot of games of really bad magic so you don't have to. That a lot of what I'm trying to do when I'm mapping out and testing things is I'm trying to figure out where the line is, where something could go wrong. It's not that I want to avoid ever making a mistake.

I want to make the mistakes because I want to learn from the mistakes. I want to figure out where are the mistakes. In some ways, if, proverbially speaking, my design is a minefield, I am trying to blow up the mines. I want to know where the danger is. I want to know where the danger is. I want to know where the problems lie. And to do that, the answer, you know, if you're trying to figure out where the mines are in a minefield, you blow them up. That's how you find them, you know. And that

when I'm doing design, I want to figure out where are the danger spots, where are the problems. And I don't do that by not making them happen. I have to make them happen. I have to make mistakes happen. And so that's the second thing is mistakes are a valuable tool that you can use because mistakes allow you to see the unseen, to figure out where things can go wrong. That if you want to not make things go wrong, you have to understand how they can go wrong. That if you don't realize where things can err, then you can't avoid that. You know, and that a lot of what we try to do in design is figure out what the problems are. In fact, I talk all the time that exploratory design, the role of exploratory design is,

I say this is my quote about exploratory design, The role of exploratory design is not to solve problems. It's to figure out what the problems are. Because when I go in to design something, I want to understand, okay, what are the issues that I have to solve? And in order to do that, I've got to try things and I've got to have things fail. If nothing ever fails, I don't understand where I can go wrong. So that is number two is mistakes are a valuable tool. They're not a byproduct. They're not something that you're trying to avoid, but occasionally happens. There's something you consciously often make happen, or at least put yourself in situations where they can happen. It's not that

I don't want to find exciting things. It's just I want to push in directions that occasionally I will find things that are wrong. I need to find the edges. I need to figure out where the lines are, where I cross into something that's going to cause me problems. And to do that, I have to push. Okay, now we get into the next part of it, which is, okay, I have mistakes. I accept them. I'm willing to understand they happen.

And now I do accept them. I use them valuably to try to make that. Okay, so now I make a mistake. I push things. I push boundaries. I make a mistake. Okay, so what do you need to do? Okay, so next big thing, lesson number three is you have to be able to acknowledge what the mistakes are.

Another big problem that people have when they deal with mistakes is they get in denial mode. They're like, oh, that's not a mistake. And they rationalize why it isn't a mistake. So when I say it's valuable and you need to make use of mistakes, another big caveat of that is you have to be willing to understand mistakes and what they are. You can't put a blind eye to them.

You can't go, oh, well, that's okay because. That one of the biggest things if you're trying to learn from mistakes is you have to understand what the mistakes are and what the mistakes are doing and importantly, what causes the mistake. So the first thing that happens, let's say I do a play test and something goes horribly wrong. What I want to figure out is,'s say I do a playtest and something goes horribly wrong. What I want to figure out is, okay, I'm excited that I learned something. I'm not ashamed of the mistake.

I go, okay. But then I need to learn from it. It's not enough to make mistakes. Mistakes don't magically make you learn. But mistakes give you a lot of, they push you to learn. Because you don't want the mistake to happen again but a big thing about this is when mistakes happen there's a lot of analysis that has to happen there's a lot of you having to look at and go okay

why exactly did this happen how did this happen what about this made it happen and so the key is really what you want to do is, okay, I do a play test. Something goes horribly wrong. Okay. First thing you want to do is analyze what were the factors that caused the mistake? Well, I mean, first is what is a mistake? What happened? You know, what went wrong that shouldn't have gone wrong? So document sort of what went wrong, then say, okay, what factors were at play that would have made that happen? And a lot of sort of learning from mistakes is trying to figure out the cause of the mistake. And sometimes, and this is another thing, is it's not always obvious what causes the

mistake. Sometimes I know I talk about mistakes, and you're learning from them. sometimes I know I talk about mistakes and you're learning from them it is work that making mistakes allows the opportunity and gives you the impetus to learn but there's still a lot of work that needs to be done so lesson number three

is when you make a mistake there's work that has to be done to understand that mistake you need to analyze that mistake you need to look at it so let's say for example I do a play test and some mechanic is horribly wrong. Okay, well, first off, I recognize, well, what's the problem? Not fun. Wasn't fun, let's say. That's my problem. Could be other problems, but let's say my problem is, oh, wow, that really wasn't fun. So then I can say, okay, why wasn't it fun? What did it do? What were, you know, the basic mistake was it wasn't fun. But let's get in the nitty-gritty.

Why wasn't it fun? What did it do that I did not enjoy? And then I will analyze and say, okay, well, it made me get in this kind of situation, which isn't a fun situation, or there wasn't an answer to it, or it's a runaway thing. Once one person does it, then there's no way to catch up or whatever.

Figure out where the problem's going wrong. Okay, then start to analyze and go, okay, well, why was that the case? Why did this mechanic push in this direction? That a lot of learning from it is you want to understand. So now here's the thing. It's not always obvious how a mistake gets made. So this is where the scientific process comes in play. obvious how a mistake gets made. So this is where the scientific process comes in play.

Once you know something goes bad, you then look at the factors that made it go wrong. Like, okay, what were the factors? Now, you might not necessarily know what the factors were. This is where you get some scientific inquiry. What you want to do then is, let's say you isolate the factors that made it go wrong, or isolate the factors that might have made it go wrong. Here's four things. I have a new mechanic. Here's four things that mechanic does. It's not fun. Okay, which of these four things is causing it to not be fun? Now, the answer is it could be any one of them. It could be two of them. It could be three of them. It could be all four of them. You don't know. So the next way to solve it is what you want to do is be scientific. You want to say, okay, I clearly know that A, B, C, and D were factors, any of which that might contributed to it. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do my next play test. I'm going to remove half the factors.

Okay. And half is very important. And the reason why is you are trying to maximize, when you're doing iteration, you're trying to maximize what is, how often you have to iterate. You want to improve as quick as possible. So when you make mistakes, the reason you want to get your factors and cut half the factors is, it's the quickest way to learn. The quickest way to learn is to say, okay, I'm going to remove half the factors from it, because what happens is, let's say, for example, there are times in which there are multiple factors, but for ease of discussing, let's assume there's one factor. Let's say there's factor A, B, C, and D, and one of them is

wrong. Well, what is the fastest way for me to learn? The fastest way for me to learn is chopped in half. So let's say I have A, B, C, and D. Okay, what I do is I retry removing C and D and leaving A and B. So what that does is, in one playtest, it tells me whether it's A and B or whether it's C or D. Because if I play, let's say I leave A and B and take out C and D. If I play it and now it's fun, I'm like, oh, it wasn't A or B, it's fun. Okay, it's C or D. If I play it and it's still not fun, I go, well, it wasn't C or D, it must be A or B. Mind you, I understand that sometimes it's multiple factors. So I'm making it a little simple for my explanation, but okay. Then depending on that, now all you have to do is, so let's say you do A, B and it's fun. Now add in C or add in D,

but add one of the two of them. If it's still fun, hey, it's the other one. If it's not fun, it's that one. So like if I, let's say I play an A, B are good. It's a fun game now. I add in C. It's still fun. D was the culprit. It's not fun. C is the culprit. And vice versa. Let's say, I mean, the same difference. If I play A, B and it's not fun. Well, now I play C and D. I'm sorry. Now I play either A, C, and D or B, C, and D. Same thing. What I do is I take the two things. Like once I play with it, I clear two of the factors.

If it's fun, it's like, oh, well, if it's fun, then A and B are cleared. Now either A or B is making it not fun, it's fun. But notice by going in half, in two play tests I can isolate the factor that if I did a play test where I did nothing but A then I did a play test where I did nothing but B

then I did a play test where I did nothing but C then a play test where I did nothing but D that's four play tests but by chopping in half I just cut it down to two so the idea essentially is when you try to figure out your factors what you want to do is figure out the factors that play into it, and then be scientific. Okay, now, be smart.

Let's say you're going to chop them in half. Leave the half you think is not causing the problem. Because that's the fastest way to learn whether or not something's working. You think, okay, I think C is causing the problem. I'll leave out C and D. I'll play A, B. Bam, A, B is fun. Okay. You know, go with your gut. One of the things I like to say is usually you will have a general sense, especially if you do it a lot. Like when I do play tests, I have a real good intuitive sense of where I think the problem lies. I don't always know exactly, but if I have to split between A, B, and C, and D, I'm pretty good at going, oh, I think it's in that half, not this half.

The reason, by the way, that you want to play the good half and not the bad half of what you think is the good half is you learn more if it's fun than if it's also not fun the second time. Because if it's not fun the second time, there might be multiple factors making it not fun. Whereas if it's fun, then you completely clear factors when they're fun. If it's still unfun, then you haven't completely cleared them, because there can be multiple factors that aren't fun. So the idea is split in half, look for the thing that you think is not causing the problem, and play with that.

Now, once you play A and B, and it's fun, you still want to play with A, Now, once you play A and B and it's fun, you still want to play with A, B, and C. You still want to isolate what is causing the problem. It's not like, it's fun, I can stop worrying. It's not enough to just find it where you're like, oh, well, it's fun now. Part of what you want to investigate, and this is where the learning comes in,

is when something goes wrong, you really want to figure out what went wrong, why it went wrong. The other thing to keep in mind is, this is lesson number four, is don't be careful of carrying over lessons between different mistakes. Because it's quite possible that factor C is unfun when combined with A and B, but is perfectly fun when not. And the idea of I play and I go, oh, C is not fun, that's not the right lesson. The right lesson is C, when combined with A and B, is not fun. And it's very easy to oversimplify or make general lessons

that will cause you problems down the road. Like if you say, oh, C is not fun, C is never fun, C isn't fun, and then you just never use C again, well, what if C is fun combined with certain things, just not in the combination you had? You're cutting yourself off from learning future things. So part of mistakes is understanding what you learned, how you learned it, and don't crisscross lessons. Because what happens there is, if you're not careful, you can sort of learn falsehoods, and that can long-term cause you problems. In fact, this gets to lesson number five, which is a caveat of lesson number four,

which is just because you've made mistakes in the past doesn't mean they will always be mistakes. That one of the biggest mistakes I see people make when designing magic, but I assume it happens in other creative endeavors, is they get so shy from a mistake, from the lessons, that they overshoot in the future of avoiding things. Wow, that wasn't fun. I better not do that again. And a lot of what we learn, like a lot of magic growth is saying,

I did something, I made a mistake, but I've learned a new way to do that thing. Like one of the ways I like to think about it is anything you try there's positive elements and negative elements and that those positive and negative elements aren't positive or negative in a vacuum they're positive or negative in that situation and it's very easy to want to take attributes and put them as holistically all the time positive all the time negative and that really isn't the case. There are a lot of interesting discoveries from magic come from me taking something that didn't work in the past

and saying, okay, let me figure out how I can make this work. Chrome is a classic example. So we made a mechanic in Eventide that counted mana symbols. And I really believed in the mechanic. I really thought it was a fun mechanic. But we made it, and wow, it really didn't go over with the public. It just, people were like, eh.

And they didn't hate it, but they really didn't have any passion for it. Now I could have just said, oh, I tried something, I failed, okay. I can write that off. But instead I said, okay, I think there's something here. I trust my gut.

I think this is a fun mechanic. Okay, what did I do wrong? How did I do it in such a way that it didn't work? And I went back and I revisited a mistake I made. You know, it would be very easy to write off the mechanic and go, eh, people didn't like it. Okay, let's do something else. But instead I said, you know what?

I'm not going to take that. I'm not going to take the. I'm not going to take the fact that this as a whole was a mistake to mean all the components were mistakes. And I went back and I said, okay, let's figure out where I went wrong and let's salvage part of this. This is a fun mechanic. And honestly, I made devotion in, in, uh, Eventide, not Eventide, in Theros. Um, and it's a good example where it was a huge hit. People really liked it. And it came from me saying, okay, I did something, I learned from it, but let's not write everything off.

Let's not jump to conclusions. It is so easy when looking at mistakes to want to just sort of make blanket statements about things or say, oh, it was a mistake. I guess we'll never do that again. There are a lot of classic things that I've learned, a lot of great things I've made, have been because I tried something and it went wrong, but then I didn't give up on it, I tried again.

So you have to believe in your ideas, and don't let mistakes... Mistakes should guide you and teach you, but don't let mistakes dishearten you. Don't let mistakes... If you believe in something, it's okay to continue on. That you guys... Part of dealing with mistakes is

you want to spend time and energy learning what goes wrong but also try to trust your gut a bit. If something about it seems like there's something you like, it's okay to hunt down that thing. I will play a lot of bad playtests to get to good playtests. And one of the things that's important for me is I want, I'm not shy of trying things. I'm not shy of making mistakes. I definitely want to learn from my mistakes. And even when I make mistakes, I want to look back and be careful not to over, overreact to the mistakes okay now I'm almost to work

so we'll get into the last big part here which is the key of mistakes in general is that you are trying to learn you're trying to map out you're trying to understand the thing that you are looking at. Now, the final lesson is sometimes mistakes have value in the product. And a lot of people don't think about that. So for example, this is an example from a whack on the side of the head. A lot of people, This is an example from a whack on the side of the head. A lot of people, one of the things he talks about in the book is that people make lessons for themselves, and then they sort of apply it across the board.

So one of them is a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And the idea is, the takeaway you have from that, well, be careful of those weak links. Those weak links will get you. And he says, no, no, no, no. The idea is a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The idea that the weak link is necessarily a bad thing is a faulty thought. And what he explains is, take the fuse in a fuse box. What the fuse is, is it's something that says,

look, if something goes wrong, I want to be the thing that breaks. I'm a cheap little replaceable thing. If something's going to blow, have me blow. And the idea there is that it being the weakest link is its strength. That a fuse exists because instead of you causing all this damage to your thing, which would cost lots and lots of money, what if just a little, tiny, easily replaceable thing broke? And that's the idea is, the idea he's really getting across is,

Roger Van Dyck, the guy who wrote the book, is that you often think of things and then you put it like, oh, weakest link. Well, weakest link is bad. Not necessarily. Sometimes the weakest link can be your value. So for example, sometimes I'll do something in a design and it doesn't work.

But what I realize is, hey, that mistake did something. Maybe I don't want that right now. So for example, I'll take Innistrad. One of the things I learned early on is if you break up cycles, you make the audience really uncomfortable. That I talk all about completion. Humans love completion. That it makes people sort of uneasy when things aren't complete because just humans want to complete things. So in Innistrad, I was trying

to make the humans feel isolated. So I, on purpose, made cycles with what we had done was the four monster tribes and the humans together rounded out all the creature types. And I actually purposely went out of my way to make some cycles where I left the humans out, where I made an incomplete cycle. Now, you might say, wait, wait, wait a minute. You had learned your lesson, hadn't you? That, you know, that cycles, incomplete cycles makes players feel, you know, at unease. It makes them feel bad. But the idea was, here, I was trying to generate a certain feel, and by using that, I was able to take a mistake and apply it in a different place to use it for its positivity.

Normally, you don't want someone feeling ill at ease, right? You don't want to go, oh, this is unnerving me. Except I had a set where I wanted to unnerve people. I wanted people to feel like things weren't fair. So by taking the humans and not completing cycles and leaving out the humans, you got a sense of all the humans were losing out and it wasn't fair. It created the feeling I was trying to create. So that's one of the big finalists in the day-to-day is the idea that mistakes are absolute and the idea

of this mistake, don't do this. No, no, no, no. Understand what it is, what's happening. The thing that's a mistake, don't do this. No, no, no, no. Understand what it is, what's happening. The thing that's a mistake in the place that you're doing it, that doesn't necessarily mean that thing might not be valuable somewhere else. You know, maybe it's your weakest link, but someday you need to make a fuse and you want the weakest link.

You know, maybe it makes the audience feel ill at ease, but one day you're trying to make them feel ill at ease. That part of understanding your systems is understanding what you do and how it generates, the emotions it generates, the response it generates, what is the feedback of that thing. And then keep in mind that you might want that thing. That when I do something and I generate, I don't think of it as solely a mistake. I think of it as, oh, well, A will generate B. If I ever want me, hey, A's there, you know? And that, so the final lesson about mistakes is don't add, be careful not to absolutely think of as mistakes

are bad. Not only can you learn from mistakes, not only can mistakes be great teachers, but sometimes mistakes actually show you something that is a valuable tool in the right place. That it's very easy. Like one of the final lessons, what I'm trying to say is that you have to understand perspective. You have to understand how and why you're doing something, why something is working or not working. But just because something isn't working in a certain place doesn't mean it can't be valuable or do something somewhere else. So anyway, I've now pulled into my parking space. Anyway, let me wrap up. The point of today is that I think that people

demonize mistakes and they really are afraid of mistakes. Once again, go listen to my podcast on mistakes if you haven't. I talk all really are afraid of mistakes. Once again, go listen to my podcast, Mistakes, if you haven't. I talk all about sort of the value of mistakes. Today is saying, okay, you can learn from them. Here's how you learn from them. Here's how you use mistakes as a tool to both improve what you're doing, to learn from what you're doing,

and at times to improve itself, that you can apply it, that you can take the lessons. Sometimes the very lessons can go later on. Sometimes you want to do the thing that at one point was a lesson, but later on, you know, it's a feature, not a bug. But anyway, that's the point of today.

I want you to sort of see mistakes as a valuable part of the process, not something to avoid, not something to be afraid of, something to be embraced, understood, and used correctly. Anyway, I'm in my parking space, so we all know what that means.

It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thanks for joining me today, guys, and I'll see you next time.