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It’s a platitude everybody’s heard before: learn from your
mistakes. Embrace them, we’re told, and grow from them. But
Jessica Bacal wondered how, with a culture that demands
perfection from women and a reluctance to discuss such
things, we can ever learn anything from our errors?
She contacted influential women from several walks of life,
and asked them about their mistakes, what they learned, and
how they grew from it.
Laurel Touby, founder of Mediabistro.com, learned the hard
way that no job was worth ignoring who she really was,
down-deep. Her advice is to “pursue work environments that
feel like the right fit for you.”
For writer Rachel Simmons, achievement was the only goal
until she accepted a Rhodes Scholarship. She realized, once
she was at Oxford, that being a Rhodes Scholar was a big
mistake for her. She was embarrassed to quit and her family
was angry, but it was a turning point in her life. Her
advice: “Don’t be afraid to quit.”
Lawyer and social activist Reshma Saujani lost a
Congressional race in 2009 and “I felt like I had let
[supporters] down.” She advises readers to keep trying:
“fail fast, fail hard, and fail often.”
From economist Carla Harris: if you “don’t know, you need to
ask.” From writer Cheryl Strayed: “We’re all rough drafts.”
From physician Danielle Ofri: nobody learns through
humiliation. Says writer Alina Tugend: master the art of
asking for money. And from writer J. Courtney Sullivan: “be
a kind and generous coworker. You never know where it might
lead you in the future.”
As a Champion Goof-Up from way back, I approached
Mistakes I Made at Work with a little trepidation. When
it comes to blunders, there are lots of chestnuts out there
that are of little help – and then there’s this book.
I was pleased with the candor that editor Jessica Bacal
found when interviewing the women she chose. Some of the
mistakes in this book might seem minor, while some are
pretty good-sized but the meaning behind each brief chapter
is the same; to wit: these women messed up, they were
embarrassed, and they lived to tell about it. Best of all,
things were often better, post-oops. And wow, that’s pretty
comforting to anybody who knows she can’t cast that first
stone…
This is an excellent book to give to a new grad, an old
hand, an employee who’s feeling red-faced, or YOU. Reading
Mistakes I Made at Work, in fact, is something you’ll
be glad you did. |
