Make Mistakes Cheap

A lot of advice about work or life is about avoiding mistakes. But that’s the wrong goal. The real trick is making mistakes cheap.

You’re going to make mistakes. Everyone does. What matters is how much they cost you. In software, a small bug in a test environment costs nothing; the same bug in production costs a weekend and your reputation. The work of a good engineer—or a good founder, or a good writer—is to design a way of working where errors are small, visible early, and easy to fix.

When my wife and I decided we wanted to start backpacking, we didn’t jump straight into a week-long trip deep in the mountains. We did “gear shakedowns”—short overnight trips with everything we planned to carry. Those quick tests showed us what worked and what didn’t before we were committed to days in the backcountry. Every mistake—a bad stove, the wrong socks—was cheap to fix. The same idea applies everywhere.

When mistakes are cheap, you can move fast. You can try things just to see what happens. Most experiments will fail, but the wins more than make up for it. That’s why startups and artists who keep their costs low learn faster than big companies or institutions that can’t afford to get things wrong. They can explore.

Expensive mistakes, on the other hand, trap you. If you’ve bet your whole career on an idea, you’ll fight every sign it might be wrong. The higher the stakes, the more defensive you become. You stop learning because you can’t afford to.

Making mistakes cheap is really about safety. Not emotional safety, but structural safety—the kind that makes risk productive instead of reckless. You can do this by shortening feedback loops, using small-scale tests, automating checks, or simply talking about half-formed ideas before committing to them.

The best systems—whether in code, design, or life—aren’t the ones that prevent mistakes entirely. They’re the ones that make mistakes useful. If you make your mistakes cheap enough, you can afford to make a lot of them, and from that pile of mistakes will come insight you couldn’t have planned.