The Error Message Longing or “How we should always treasure our mistakes“
The conversation was loud and happy, scattered with high-pitched laughs that were probably annoying to the people around. I was laughing too, though I grew anxious by the minute, fidgeting on my chair. Surely someone by now would have noticed that I didn’t pour anything into the conversation for some time. Someone would ask me very casually, “what about you, Julie? Any bad luck recently?” and all eyes would turn on me, over expecting, mouth open in the assumption of a chuckle. Instead of being cornered, I decided to jump off on my own and loudly inserted myself in the next flow:
“Haha! It’s like me the other day! I rushed all afternoon to finish something for a client, I managed it just on time, only to realize later that I left home that night without sending it to them!”
There was a bit of an awkward silence, with frowning. Someone asked:
“Was the client mad at you?”
“Oh no, I sent it the next morning. They… they were totally fine with it.”
“Oh, ok. Cool then.”
The embarrassing silence resumed where we left it and I took a gulpy sip of my drink. Not long after, somebody else jumped in with a proper failure anecdote this time:
“Anyway, you remember that client Z? I’ve just heard back from them again!”
And thankfully, in the, “no way!!” and the, “did they ask for more?”, my embarrassing story was wiped away from the table for an actual one.
As I lingered in the bathroom, I reflected on the past months of work with a bitter feeling of FOMO. I must have been caught in a string of bad luck lately because all my projects were going well. What was wrong with me? When was it that things started to go smoothly? Could the day of stumbling be behind me? Was I doomed to go as of now from one project to another, evenly, without bump or jerk? I started to hyperventilate, which is not something you want to happen in a public restroom.
Surely, eventually, something will go off the rail. I will accidentally misplace a precious file, my computer will crash (I have a Macbook so I know I can have faith in their unreliability) or I won’t be able to meet my deadlines. Who knows, maybe I will even delete some super important files from a client server?
Everything will go fine, everything will go back to normal, I kept repeating myself, no need to worry. Because you see, I love making mistakes. Mistakes are good, mistakes are precious. Mistakes are sudden rain showers you need to experience if you don’t want your crops to go dry.
I know that as a freelancer, they can be particularly scary because everything rests on you. Since you’re literally on your own, you’re the lightning road on the only building standing to catch all the lightning strikes. I used to work in an agency where an entire army was standing between me and the client. Account directors, project managers, project leaders, chiefs strategy, they all took the bullets for me. Now, I’m in the frontline, a flag carrier in plain view, alone on an bare field, for my client to empty their barrels on me.
And sure, I don’t like to make mistakes. Like anyone, I wish I hadn’t made them in the first place. They make me feel stupid, ashamed and amateur everytime. But I always love what my mistakes taught me, afterward. I love that mordant alchemy that transforms accidents into valuable lessons—and more than anything, into the best stories to tell your friends and peers on a night out.
There’s something to be said about learning through experiences, especially bad ones, in your work life. Everybody will tell you that one of the most common mistakes is to underestimate the time needed to complete a mission, but it’s one thing to know it and another to work several nights in a row, with no bathroom break allowed, in order to meet a deadline. You will be warned against invasive clients but you won’t understand it until you haven’t checked the expiration date on your passport after a demanding meeting. Most and for all, you won’t truly learn to save your work as you go until you’ve lost hours of labour that time your computer crashed. That permanent indent on the wall, a few centimeters to your screen, will be there to remind you of it. They say, “you learn as you go,” but the truth is, you often learn as you go wrong.
In data sciences, you want your margin of error to be as narrow as possible, and you build your entire system around the prevention of miscalculations but in real life, the bumpy method of trials and errors seems to me more effective and more realistic. How many people, starting their dataviz journey, asked me anxiously about my processes, as if more experienced data designers had discovered the secret recipe that allows them to succeed every time? I’d like to think all chefs burn a dish from time to time. It seems particularly important when you do a creative work, a graphic one after all, where happy accidents have to be welcomed as part of the creation process. I must admit that most of my superior design happened because I sneezed in the middle of a keyboard shortcut. Bugs, errors, mistakes, accidents—in the end, couldn’t they all be malicious elves working in our back to make our shoes shine brighter?
A sharp knock on the door of the bathroom suddenly interrupted my Brother Grimm analogy:
“Julie, are you stuck in there? Like that time you locked yourself in your toilets and the locksmith had to rescue you in your undies?”
Well, I guess the reassuring thing is that, even if my professional life goes alarmingly too well, I can always count on my personal life to take over from there.
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Datacitron (aka Julie Brunet) is an independent data & information designer as well as the Creative Director of Nightingale, the journal of Datavisualization Society. She believes in the accessibility of information through design and storytelling, and the virtuous role data designers can play in our society
