Life Lessons Crocheting Taught Me About Handling Mistakes

There are many opportunities to learn more about life and ourselves – who knew crocheting would be one of them! Then again, it shouldn’t be surprising – mistakes are a common denominator between life and picking up a skill. There’s much to learn in handling mistakes. Here are five life lessons I’ve picked up through crocheting related to handling mistakes.

I hope you’ll find them useful!

Lesson 1: Recognize when a mistake cannot be ignored

After more than a year of crocheting, I still make this mistake.

Having crocheted many rounds, I’ll watch with mounting disappointment as my work rippled and distorted. If you don’t crochet, this happens when we do the increases wrong for projects done in rounds.

I’d keep crocheting in the hopes that if I increased or decreased the stitches a certain way, I wouldn’t have to unravel the project. You know, wishful thinking!

It almost never works.

Usually, the project will continue to ripple and curl and look weirder than ever. So I’ll end up having to undo more than I’d have had to if I’d corrected it right when I realized the mistake.

Life

The first lesson is to face the mistakes or problems that will affect the rest of the piece.

Similarly, there are some problems in life that you shouldn’t ignore because they’ll affect other aspects of your life.

These could be unhealthy relationships, jobs, or habits. Dealing with them may be tougher than continuing life with them, but you should still deal with them. Otherwise, they’ll affect your life adversely with time. As surely as crucial crochet mistakes lead to crooked crochet pieces.

In other words, you can try to ignore them, but if a fundamental part of your life isn’t right, your life will be adversely affected.

Which leads to life lesson 2.

Lesson 2: Don’t be afraid to undo your hard work

If you spotted a mistake that would affect the rest of the project, stop and correct it right away. Do this even if it means you’ll have to undo a significant amount of stitches you’ve done. Or even start afresh!

I made this mistake crocheting a hat. Having changed the stitch pattern at the wrong spot, my hat was turning into a boxy thing instead of a dome-shaped headwear.

The silly thing was, I spotted the mistake two rows after making it, but I continued crocheting hoping that it’ll straighten itself out eventually. Yes, I was lazy. Needless to say, it didn’t.

Because I didn’t want to undo my hard work, I didn’t face the fact that it looked more like a box than a hat until it was almost completed. I ended up undoing days of work.

Life

The Concorde fallacy

There’s this thing known as the Concorde fallacy in economics. It describes what happens when we refuse to give up on something that isn’t working because we’ve invested time, effort, or money in it. Since we didn’t want our efforts to go to waste, we invest more in it, resulting in more wasted resources.

In the same vein, there are many things in life that simply won’t work no matter how much more effort we put in it.

Making a mistake isn’t the problem, being afraid to waste invested efforts can be. It’s important to know when to stop and take a different action, even if it means that all the efforts put in would go down the drain.

For some, it could be an established career in a field that isn’t suitable for them. For others, it could be a failed business venture that simply can’t be revived.

If you know that you’ve made a mistake that deems your previously-invested efforts a total waste, don’t let it deter you from correcting your mistake. Otherwise, you may end up wasting a lot more effort and not be able to achieve what you set out to do!

Lesson 3: Mistakes are lessons we learn from

That said, undoing your work is not only for correcting mistakes, it’s also a part of learning. If nothing else, we learn what not to do the next time around.

When I was making mittens for Anth, I had to adjust a pattern for ladies’ gloves in small size to a men’s large size. I didn’t know how to do it, so I had to unravel and redo the mittens half a dozen times before I got it right.

It was tedious and I was very close to giving up, but I learned a great deal from the project and made a fitting pair of mittens that he enjoys using. 

Life

I’ll be honest, I’m deathly afraid of failing. I’ve always been a fragile person, but crocheting made me a little braver. A little more able to deal with mistakes and “failures”.

Didn’t they say you only fail when you stop trying?

They’re right. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, don’t be discouraged by it, and don’t give up. Take mistakes as a learning process and know that your efforts will pay off eventually.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you need to redo a project every time you make a mistake. 

Lesson 4: Know when a mistake can and should be ignored

When I work on a crochet project, I usually count my stitches. Still, every now and then, I’ll miscount and have one stitch more or less. This is a small and common issue that wouldn’t be obvious if spotted soon enough. All I need to do is sneak in or reduce a stitch in the next row and it wouldn’t be too noticeable. 

If every stitch has to be perfect, we’ll never finish a piece.

Besides, what seemed like a mistake can result in something better.

Once, I tried to make a pot coaster. After weaving in the ends and completing it, I realized it was curling too much at the edge. It was pretty, it just won’t work as a pot coaster. Instead of unraveling it, I turned it into a cute little basket. It became one of my favorite pieces.

If you spotted a mistake way too late, it’s no big deal. Let your creativity run loose and you might be able to turn it into something even better.

Life

Some problems need to be fixed, but some can be accepted and let go of.

In life, if we stressed over every imperfection and want everything to go the way we want it to, we’re not going to enjoy it.

It’s better to be able to let go of mistakes and bad times, that’s the only way we can move on.

Life never goes the way we want it to. Being able to recognize this and accept the way life unfolds is liberating.

And when things don’t go your way, look at it from another perspective and perhaps you can make an opportunity out of it.

As the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!

By the way, there’s a big difference between fixing problems and hanging on to them. Even if you have a problem you need to fix, don’t fixate on it.

Lesson 5: Don’t get too attached to the results

Crocheting is like life sometimes, we often find ourselves advancing one step forward only to take three steps back.

To me, the most important lesson of all is to not be attached to “progress”, “achievements”, “success”, and etc.

If you enjoy living, it doesn’t matter if something arises out of living or not. It’s the same thing as crocheting. If you enjoy it, each stitch is a pleasure, whether or not a beautiful thing gets created in the end.

Remember when you were a kid, you’ll spend an afternoon building a sand castle and have fun regardless of how it turned out? And when you lost interest you simply moved on to something else?

I think we’ll all benefit from learning from that kid.

Don’t place too much attachment on deriving value out of things. Instead, be like the kid who did something simply out of enjoyment.

Don’t do to be happy, be happy doing.

Much love to you!

---

If you enjoyed these life lessons, you may enjoy this post too!

Good Life Lessons to Begin the New Year With