Mistakes are valuable
Mark argues that without mistakes we never learn to be better at anything. When we are successful, the beast that we can learn is that something is working and we may even be unaware of what works and why. We tend to repeat the formula because it just works. We aren't encouraged to change or to try a different way. Mistakes, on the other hand, force reevaluation. Mistakes demand some analysis and to do so we need to stop and think. Errors come with a negative emotion and it's hard to cope with negative emotions. The key is in understanding what lesson a mistake is teaching. In the case of design, mistakes are part of the process and they happen far more often than successes. If you fail to learn from mistakes you ought to repeat them and fail to evolve.
The life lesson is pretty clear. Mistakes carry the burden of negative emotions but the only way to get through is to accept them and think on them as a path towards greatness. They tell us that something is wrong and is up to us to uncover what is wrong. It's hard and it takes time, but those who fail to learn from them are destined to repeat them.
I've heard the same from a calculus teacher. In science the only path to progress is to learn from past mistakes. What Mark teaches is an universal truth. If you look at the auto-mobile industry, formula one, sports, law systems, etc. Over time the only way to make progress is to understand mistakes. The past history of sports, formula one, auto-mobile industry, etc is filled with mistakes and even deaths. I'm not trying to glamorize deaths. I'm telling you that we have a much more robust technology regarding safety because the industry have had to learn from its own mistakes. The same can be said about the evolution of medicine, food industry, chemistry and much more. The human history itself is a testament that we have to learn from mistakes.
When we don't know how to solve a problem, it means that we have to learn something to solve it. When we already know how to solve a problem, solving it doesn't make us learn anything. We just know the path already and nothing new can be gained by repeating it. If we go wrong with a problem, we are forced to reflect for a moment. I can give a personal example from admission exams here. I had to take admission exams for a local university more than once. Every time I took it, after I went home, I knew which mistakes I've made during the exam. The next time I sat for the same exam I could still remember what I did wrong in the previous attempt. There are multiple things that can go wrong: you spend too much time on a question; you drink something that forces you to go to the bathroom minutes later or multiple times; you didn't slept well the night before; you forgot to fill a bubble in the exam's sheet; so on. The emotional burden is heavy for sure, as Mark noted.
Mark himself has a long list of mistakes. There are multiple mechanics, cards, sets, which either did poorly on market research, were too powerful or too weak. The secret is that he did learn from multiple mistakes to reach the level of proficiency he has today (2022). It's very much the same with language. When we learn any language we do make lots of mistakes. It's impossible to not make any mistake. Every mistake that we make with language comes with a strong emotion and the stronger our response is, stronger is our memory of it. Over time we become better and make fewer and fewer mistakes. With level design I can assert that I've had the same experience as Mark. When we begin we don't know much and we do make lots of mistakes with lights, colors, textures, geometry, so on. It's only after a long list of mistakes that we can reach a high level of proficiency in level design.
There are multiple studies in psychology about mistakes. I once read somewhere that one of the key elements present in the minds of serial killers or psychopaths is that they fail to learn from their mistakes. When we make a mistake we feel the negative emotions and it's because of the negative impact that we tend to avoid repeating the same mistake. In the case of psychopaths they don't feel (this is under dispute) the burden of the negative emotions and this would explain why they repeat the same patterns over and over. I'm only mentioning this to support Mark's argument that design is very much tied to making mistakes. Now there is another problem which is the failure to acknowledge a mistake as being our own. This is one of the key features of narcissistic personality. They fail to acknowledge their own mistakes because they have a complex mechanism of self-defence. They may recognize that a mistake did happen, but the cause of it was someone else or the environment itself is to be blamed. Just to remind you, failure to acknowledge mistakes by itself is not what makes a person a narcissist or a psychopath. It's not that simple.
I could go on discussing regret but it'd be entering a realm which I don't have enough wisdom to enter. What I could say is, to keep myself closer to Mark's words, we have to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them. To find excuses or blame shift mistakes is a recipe to never grow up, to be stuck in time and never move forwards. How to do it? I can't offer any advice here other than to try to understand emotions and to not run away from mistakes. Because the fear of making mistakes is strongly related to perfectionism. What I can tell you is that to learn from a mistake does require time and patience. To be reckless is synonymous to not care about making mistakes and here is how I'd complement Mark's lesson: mistakes are going to happen but that's not a good excuse to justify mistakes.
One last note: Sam Stoddard has a lesson about trying the wrong way first. Is that the same as making a mistake on purpose? I'd argue that no. There is a difference between experimentation and deliberately erring. If a person repeatedly makes the same mistakes I'd imagine that they are somehow impaired. There is something preventing them from recognizing and understanding the mistake in the first place. However, if those mistakes are deliberately causing harm, then we can at least see that person as lacking empathy. At worst we'd be dealing with someone who is truly evil or a psychopath.
Reference:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/resolutions-2009-01-05
Dr. Frank Yeomans and the channel Borderlinernotes
Dr. Ramani Durvasula and her knowledge on narcissism
Professor Alan Delazeri Mocellim and his knowledge on toxic relationships (portuguese only)
Dr. Tracey Marks and her knowledge in psychiatry
Professor Pedro Calabrez and his knowledge on life and neurosciences (portuguese only)
Dr. Daniel Martins de Barros and his knowledge on psychiatry and philosophy (portuguese only)