Make low-stakes mistakes often.

When I am speaking a foreign language, I mess up the grammar all the time. In Spanish, I frequently mix up masculine and feminine, lose a word, or make up some word in the moment. Despite sounding like I missed fundamental parts of a language education, people understand me perfectly well—because perfection is not required.

After you've got 80%, that extra 20% gets a lot harder. You have to see whether or not it's worth the effort—or if really your 80% gets the job done. You can't do 100% of everything—believe me, I've tried. Doing fewer things and giving those things more attention is a gift of wisdom and temperance.

So I don’t try to get my Spanish or my French perfect when I speak. I just try to speak, and I make mistakes and learn from them. The stakes are low. A mild embarrassment, a miscommunication, some scenario that might be less than ideal—these are all easily survivable circumstances. Embrace the mistakes; just put the learning into practice.

It’s worth noting the distinction between low and high stakes. If you’re learning on the job—maybe you’re striving to become a leader—it is wise to exercise caution when a frivolous action may cost you your job. For example, sending an unpolished email to a client could damage trust or lose a contract. In such high-stakes situations, mistakes have more serious consequences and demand more preparation.

When the stakes are low, you can make mistakes and exercise your anti-fragility. The mistakes are opportunities to make you grow. As we go through life trying things out, and in turn making mistakes, we build an intuition around what kinds of mistakes and learning we are making. This intuition, this collection of referenced experiences, is a powerful compass to guide and protect us.

I like to think of making mistakes—and perhaps more accurately, pushing ourselves and making low-stakes mistakes along the way—similar to physical exercise. Lifting weights is challenging, uncomfortable. Pushing through cardio sometimes feels like we cannot go any further. Maybe we want to try some new routine, some new way of exercising ourselves—and as we try, our movement isn’t correct. If I execute an exercise, say a squat, with the incorrect form or wrong equipment—I lose my balance because I’m wearing rounded shoes instead of flat shoes—it’s easily recoverable if I’m lifting low weights.

As soon as I near 80-100 kilos, those mistakes become a lot more serious and can cause injury. But I can correct those mistakes more quickly and with fewer consequences when the stakes are low. This is where making mistakes early, often, and when stakes are low can serve us. We want to make mistakes and build that intuition when there is no consequential punishment for doing so. If the consequence is too severe—the equivalent of dropping a weight on your foot or tearing a muscle—you’ll be taken out of the game indefinitely. The point is to stay in the game.

Making mistakes requires getting used to discomfort. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes embarrassing, to make mistakes. Some of us are shameless, but for the rest of us, we can leverage wisdom to temper discomfort. We can know the discomfort is okay, that it’s a growing pain, and that we are learning from our mistakes. This keeps us on a path up and to the right for whatever we want to improve at.

What mistakes are you willing to make today to bring you closer to where you want to be?