What's up everyone, welcome back to another episode of Founder's Journal,

the best startup show on planet earth. Today's episode is about how to deal with mistakes in business,

so let's hop right into it.

I had an employee make a mistake with one of my businesses recently. It wasn't a big mistake,

but it was the second or third mistake that they had made within a single week,

and so I tried to be really intentional in how I responded to them and the mistake they had made.

I wanted them to understand that the mistakes that they were making were below the standard of work

that both I expected and I thought they were capable of, but I also didn't want to over-react

in a manner that would make them less likely to share mistakes in the future.

And I thought a lot about how do I strike this balance of the employee feeling safe,

but also them understanding the standard that was expected of them because there's this

old adage about running businesses where what you allow or what you accept to happen is the

standard that you ultimately accept for your business. And so if you want a high standard,

you should only be accepting things that meet that standard. If you accept things that fall

below that standard, that is the new standard that you've set within your business.

And so after I message this person trying to strike that balance I just described,

I reflected more not just on this mistake, but how I think about mistakes more generally in business,

because they will happen frequently and they will happen at all levels of the organization.

Some mistakes will be insignificant. Other mistakes could actually be kind of like business

crushing, if they're high risk and large in scale. And in general mistakes aren't a bad thing,

as long as they are the right type of mistakes. Because the right type of mistakes are not about

carelessness or lack of ability necessarily, they're actually a sign that you're pushing a company

...