People make mistakes. It’s just another one to pretend we don’t.
Journalists, bankers, nuclear scientists, admirals, doctors, lawyers, judges, academics, comedians, preachers, all of us.
I make more than most, and right in front of everyone. Spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, factual mistakes, mistakes in tone, mistakes in context, mistakes in conclusions, mistakes in correction of other mistakes, mistakes in understanding, mistakes of commission, mistakes of omission. I’ve made all those and then some.
Red fish, blue. I could fill Dr. Suess books with every color and type of mistake. I’m a Cat in the Hatful of mistakes, splattered everywhere. Wait, did I spell Suess correctly? Nope. It’s Seuss. See?
In firefighting, the joke is the second crew in is there mostly to correct the first crew’s mistakes. But you do the best you can with the information at hand. You don’t get to do nothing because you might make a mistake.
You will make mistakes and plenty of them. Count on it. It’s almost the definition of taking action, even the most, best right action. Welcome to life as lived. Maybe this will prove AI’s greatest advantage if we can ever program out the human hand.
I don’t remember the exact metaphorical flogging students endure at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, the top undergraduate program in the country. Something like an automatic F on any paper turned in with so much as a typo. No doubt along with baleful glares, hints at the low condition of your worth, right there with the worm’s.
Apparently the experience is scarring, embarrassment acute, a brutal rite of passage that in theory creates perfect reporters ever after, or at least the most neurotic I’ve ever worked with.
Hey, it’s not the worst quality in a reporter for an editor, believe me, though some horse whispering may be in order to pry copy from a Medill grad on deadline.
And yep, still there are mistakes. I try not to make too big a show of fixing them then, definitely keeping inclinations to smirk very much to myself.
Soldiers, cops, sales people and every athlete knows mistakes are the wages of ultimate success. What they do is too fast and fluid for otherwise. It’s all read and react, try and adjust and try again.
But good luck getting bureaucrats, doctors or, ahem, journalists to admit theirs.
I once tried to teach a doctor how to sail on a mountain lake. He said he wanted to learn, but he didn’t listen to me once we got out on the water. He had the boat in irons in no time, which of course couldn’t possibly have been his doing by wagging the tiller to and fro, ignoring everything I told him about the sail being a wing and how to read the wind. Easy enough in the middle of the lake to wait him out, backfill the sail, and then tack in. I just had to be patient enough for the teaching moment to blow my way.
Bureaucrats are more frustrating, though I recommend more the approach with the doctor than doggedly pointing out an obvious mistake, speaking slower and louder with each repeat of the aggrieved correction. They’ll leave you in irons if you’re expecting some fresh realization at your hectoring, like, “Oh, you’re right.”
In each case it seems there’s a power dynamic at play. The bureaucrat in his element and the doctor even out of his require a sense of control, false though it may be. They are making mistakes more fundamental than the obvious ones.
Same with the journalist who never makes mistakes, just ask ’em. Never misquotes, never misspells, never misunderstands, never accepts correction. And somehow never gets it quite right, either.
I’m not sure what lies at the root, other than perhaps the impossible job description to be a lay person who not only knows experts’ jobs better than they do, but what they should be doing, too. All on deadline.
That’s a lot to ask. The real stars in my business know this much, at least. So they become just a little less vulnerable to that fatal mistake of what we know for sure that just ain’t so — thank you, Mark Twain.
Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.