mistake question.

How do you answer ‘What are the biggest mistakes you have made professionally’ in a job interview? I hear this question more and more in political debates (or forums).

There appear to be no easy answers.

Here is mine.

I am a human being. I am not infallable.

If you define a mistake as “a wrong action attributable to bad judgment or ignorance or inattention;”, then we all have made some mistakes in life. We are an accumulation of the actions we have taken in the past.

I can only make two claims.

First, I have tried to minimize any mistakes based on bad judgement or inattention. This means any mistakes I’ve made should have been based on ignorance. This is,generally, due to a lack of information, which may or may not be directly attributable to me.

Secondly, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.”

I like the more cerebral answer that I find in the following poem by;

Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken (1915)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

admin posted at 2009-10-20 Category: Uncategorized

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