That Time I F@#%ed Up
By: Zan Dubin-Scott
Tags: Gratitude, Life Lessons, Learning, Mistakes, Humility

From an actress to an astronaut: The anguishing mistakes that helped propel them to success

By Zan Dubin-Scott

I’ve always been obsessed with making mistakes, as in, I hate making them. And anguish over them. They make me want to crawl under a rock. With the other arthropods.

Actually, it’s gotten a lot better over the years. Perfectionism is for the young, perhaps? But I know I’m not alone. I also know that hearing about others’ blunders invariably brings relief. My friend Helen knows this, too, which is why she suggested I do these interviews. She is all about helping others. So we hope you enjoy.

And by way of a small thanks to those below who shared their stories with me, here are a couple of mine, briefly: The time I wrote an angry, ugly email about a supervisor and promptly sent it directly to her; the time I published incorrect hours for a museum while writing for The Los Angeles Times, sending one extremely but justifiably angry L.A. couple 200 miles north to Santa Barbara to find the museum’s doors closed; the time I, well, I’ve got a lot of much bigger ones. Maybe for another time.

BOB SIPCHEN is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and associate professor of writing and rhetoric at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Bob Sipchen, who won a Pulitzer Prize as a Los Angeles Times reporter, has one of those stories that will give the chills to anyone who has ever fiercely wanted a job. It happened in a very public way at one of the nation’s largest and most respected newspapers.

Early in his career, Sipchen was writing as a temp of sorts for The Times while, indeed, fiercely hoping and gunning to get a full-time staff job. Even more than that? “I wanted to write good journalism, which is accurate journalism, and I made a huge error,” he says.

It happened within hours of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion that killed all seven crew members aboard and transfixed the country for weeks. Though relatively new to the industry and still green, Sipchen had already distinguished himself, so editors pulled him into the biggest story of the year for an exploration of the gap between public perception of the risks of space travel (“you just jump into a space suit!”) and what experts knew (“it was terribly dangerous, especially back then”).

He wrote a long, compelling piece quoting all kinds of experts. “It was a big deal and it was my shot at the big time, so to speak.”

Well, you could say he gave away his shot. Almost.

Sipchen, then and now, has a “glitch” in his brain, he says, an “Achilles heel” that causes him to mix up names. This, by the way, links to one of the first lessons taught in journalism school: you misspell someone’s name? You get an F. So what did Sipchen do? Instead of calling it the Challenger, he called it the Columbia, another shuttle in service at the time.

“I blew up the wrong space shuttle,” he says. “And believe it or not, people noticed. It was horrifying, just horrifying.”

The greenhorn had to explain his malfunctioning neurological circuitry to the paper’s senior editors, who someone of his station would rarely even speak to. And the copy editors got reamed for missing it, too. “You make the whole process look bad,” he says.

But one copy editor’s reaction speaks to why Sipchen was hired on staff within a couple of years, going on years later to win the Pulitzer for a series of editorials he wrote with Alex Raksin about the unhoused in L.A. The copy editor “ said the story was just really well written, and he was so caught up he read right past the error” (which was eerily prescient; the Columbia also met disaster).

Of course, Sipchen learned an invaluable lesson, one he never would have succeeded without. And he doffs his hat to any journalist who doesn’t learn it the agonizing way. “It taught me that self-editing is critically important. The writing and reporting don’t mean anything if in the end you are inaccurate.”

NEAL PAYTON is an architect and a principal of Torti Gallas + Partners, an architecture, planning and urban design firm. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

About two decades ago, Payton made a mistake that unearthed a much bigger oversight, indeed one you could say the whole country is still grappling with today.

His initial blunder came at the end of a long day during which he and his team were soliciting community input on a project designed to redevelop and unify diverse commercial streets in Charlottesville, VA. A reporter approached Payton and asked why so few African Americans were in attendance, to which he said he “glibly replied, ‘well, maybe they are just not that interested.’ “

“I was tired and not thinking and didn’t realize the implications of what I was saying, and it made it look like I was uncaring and hadn’t done my homework,” he recalls.

The next morning, a city official approached the Maryland native and questioned if he had in fact told a radio reporter that African Americans in Charlottesville essentially didn’t give a whit about an issue affecting the city’s busy downtown. Then, a number of African Americans showed up for Payton’s final presentation, and, looking at him and his team, all of whom were white, “basically accused me of not caring about the African American community and not having a clue about what I was doing.”

Payton didn’t really argue. Instead, he owned up to the mistake and entered into a conversation

with attendees about what he and his firm could do differently. “We learned a lesson from that, not merely about how to deal with the press, but more importantly recognizing that no matter how good our outreach efforts might be, we’ll miss people and we have to figure out how to not miss anyone in future.”

Payton’s firm actually had and has a diverse staff, but the incident also reminded him that that’s not enough. Diverse teams are important, too, and if the firm isn’t hearing from all segments of a community, more must be done. “The experience sensitized me to issues of inclusion and made a permanent positive impact on how I practice,” he says. “It remains relevant and critical today.”

As for the general issue of making mistakes, Payton’s personal philosophy is “if you don’t make mistakes, you’re not challenging yourself much, and you’re certainly not learning. My thinking is I don’t want to repeat the same mistakes. I want to make new mistakes and keep learning.”

Torti Gallas has a similar ethos, he added.

“We tell potential clients that we have 67 years of learning from our mistakes.”

VICKIE COX EDMONDSON is a management strategist and management professor at Alabama’s Tuskegee University. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. Vickie Cox Edmondson, who has often been the first or only Black woman in a variety of high-profile, high pressure positions, has a very different relationship to mistakes than many. She, like other Black friends and colleagues, hasn’t felt she’s had the luxury that whites and others in the majority have had to make mistakes that could jeopardize a career.

“The outcome would not have been the same,” says Edmondson, a management strategist and academic who has worked at two household-name, predominantly white corporations and spent the past quarter-century developing support systems, in and out of the workplace, and academic programs designed to avoid blunders and ensure professional success for herself and others.

Indeed, because of her assiduous attention to the issue, Edmondson couldn’t think of a major professional mistake she has made.

Today a management professor at Alabama’s Tuskegee University, Edmondson’s approach puts a premium on preparation, as well as “practice, practice, practice.” She is also meticulous with every word. “We know if we slip, it could be detrimental,” she says, “not just to ourselves, but to those who depend on us.”

And she and her Black colleagues and friends, in and outside of the organizations she has worked for, sustain a kind of informal but crucial support group to watch and review each other’s work for gaffs or gaps. “Don’t tell me it sounds good,” she’ll tell friends, “I need you to break this down and find the holes. It takes a village to avoid the types of mistakes that can ruin our career.”

The first black woman to receive a PhD in business at the University of Georgia,

Edmondson teaches a course at Tuskegee called Corporate Survival Skills, which includes a unit aptly named Surviving Workplace Setbacks. She recently created a YouTube series, based on her book, “The Thinking Strategist,” titled “Think Before You….” to address the issue.

“I have spent years educating students why they, too, must be intentional.”

Edmondson doesn’t blame organizations she’s worked for the burden she has felt to avoid mistakes and is grateful for all the opportunities that have come her way. She feels she has always been allowed to take risks and that her employers “went out of their way to make me feel I belonged.” The pressure she felt and has shared with many cohorts, was internal, she says. But, “a stigma of incompetence has been placed on people of color — it’s not how we feel, it is how many of the majority feel about us — so we have to overcome that stigma. I wanted to assure my employers that they knew they had made the right decision in hiring me.”

To be sure, everyone wants to do well for their family and boosters. But while imposter syndrome is common, Edmondson says, and while everyone is concerned about making mistakes, it’s not the same if you’re Black. “As a white person, you have a lot of support around the company, there’s going to be someone who can vouch for you if you make a mistake. With us, we have a limited few who know us, so it’s very hard to overcome that stigma. But eventually, the people I worked with saw how committed I was to not making mistakes.”

If the responsibility sounds crushing, it can be, she says.

“But if we don’t do it, then we don’t get to go into new areas and chart new paths for others to follow. Someone has to be the first. You just don’t want to be the last.”

ALEXANDRA PAUL is an actress, environmental activist and wellness coach who lives in Los Angeles.

Actress and environmental activist Alexandra Paul has one we can all relate to. A bit of a doozy, as far as social currency goes. And it could have been a career crasher.

Best known for her bathing-suited portrayal of Lt. Stephanie Holden in the original “Baywatch,” and for escaping a demonic Plymouth in “Christine,” Paul recalls walking into an audition in 2001 with director Joe Dante (“Gremlins,” “The Howling”). Back in those days, auditions were in person, not on video, and as Dante scanned Paul’s resume, he looked up and said, “ ‘Piranha,’ huh?” referring to the 1995 fish-themed horror flick she’d starred in. It was a remake of the 1978 original.

In response, Paul blurted out, “yeah, can you believe they remade the first one?!”

Not one for sarcasm, Paul guesses she just wanted to appear witty. But all the air suddenly left the room.



“There was this silence,” she says, “this pall, and I thought, ‘Uh oh…. did he direct that first one?”

Indeed, Dante had, which Paul confirmed after leaving the try-out feeling wholly contrite, freaked out and embarrassed.

“Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.”

The lesson? “Alexandra, don’t be a smart ass. You’re not a good smart-ass anyway,” she says. “Just be yourself and shut up. It’s always better to be positive rather than snarky or disparaging.”

Of course, being herself was the formula for Paul’s further acting success, which has included starring roles in some 40 independent films, a guest spot on “Mad Men” and getting arrested in the documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” Paul also has a wellness-coaching business and will have appeared in three more movies before 2021 is out.

Clearly, her “Piranha” encounter didn’t sink her.

“I survived,” she says with a smile in her voice.

ROBERT THIRSK is an engineer, physician and retired Canadian Space Agency astronaut. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Astronaut Robert Thirsk, who has spent more time in space than any other Canadian, is on the record about blunders.

“Astronauts always have fear of injury or death, but our greatest fear is of making a mistake,” he said from the International Space Station (ISS), where he spent six months in 2009.

Granted, Thirsk and his cohorts thrive on extra-atmospheric stress and live to forge new frontiers. But the pressure is real. And it’s not just cabin pressure. Astronauts are working on behalf of countless others who have invested millions of dollars as well as time and effort in the mission, Thirsk reminded me by phone from his Ottawa home recently. Indeed, Thirsk has also spoken about the absolute need to make one’s mistakes during training, only, which is what he has done as an astronaut. “It isn’t enough to train until we get it right; we need to train until we can’t get it wrong,” he has said.

But he has a tale about getting it wrong, “the worst mistake I ever made,” that, in real-life, would have resulted in catastrophic damage.

Thirsk, an engineer and physician, is now retired from the Canadian Space Agency. But as a young astronaut, he was invited to participate in a training exercise at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston inside a simulator of the ISS. He was excited about the eight-hour session that would end with the re-enactment of a major emergency, such as a fire or depressurization.

“These training simulations are designed to stress the ground team and crew and to test our ability to solve problems together,” he recalled. Indeed, toward the end of the day, mission control called Thirsk on the space-to-ground radio to say they had detected a leak in the cooling loop on the port side of the station. Cooling is needed to dissipate heat generated by computers, furnaces and other systems.

“Mission control said I needed to immediately execute a procedure to shut down the port side cooling loop and reconfigure the starboard side so that the critical equipment could be transferred to the starboard loop and continue to be cooled,” he said.

To add to this stress test, just as Thirsk got down to work on the cooling system, ISS control informed him that all radio communications were about to go dead. He’d be on his own. In silence. The astronaut forged ahead, working confidently by himself on the task at hand. Until….

“I started hearing some warning tones over the speaker and got this sick feeling in my stomach I was doing something wrong.”

Indeed, 20 minutes later, with communications restored, Thirsk said, “my greatest fear was confirmed: I had shut down the good loop, the starboard loop, instead of the bad one. All the station equipment was overheating. I had caused the station to fail. It was not operable and we had to shut down the simulation.

“If this had been a real day in space, we would have lost the entire multibillion-dollar ISS and I would have become infamous,” he said. And, while this was just a simulation, “it was the low point of my astronaut career.”

Of course, during debriefing, Thirsk acknowledged his error and the team analyzed how such events could be prevented and done differently the next time. But, of course, it was an invaluable experience and he never repeated the mistake.

“I learned 100 lessons that benefited my career,” he said, “such as listen carefully to instructions, ask for help when unsure and insist on backup when performing such a critical procedure. Then of course I learned the importance of openly discussing mistakes and failures and the value of speaking candidly. It allows us to hone our skills, improve our performance and enhance our chances of success.”

Today, Thirsk is more confident than ever about the blessings of blunders.

“We really need to have more of a culture where we are encouraged to speak candidly of our failures and mistakes. I’m suspicious of individuals and organizations who only speak of their accomplishments. I have much more respect for people who have the courage to speak candidly of their failures.”

We have much to learn from those who boldly went where no one has gone before, he added. “Even if they didn’t initially succeed.”

EDA SEAVER is a retired teacher who lives in San Pedro, California.

If you ever meet anyone as honest as Eda Seaver, ring me up.

Eda is a friend. A brutally self-honest friend who did not hold back when I asked this retired teacher (33 years with the Los Angeles Unified School District) about mistakes.

Background: Anyone who knows Eda, knew John, her husband of 37 years. Where Eda went, John went, no matter the event. They were in love, great friends, and we all knew it. And we all grieved with Eda when John died at 95 in 2016. Here’s what Eda told me:

“The mistakes I regret the most involve not recognizing that my husband was closer to dying than I thought.

“I tried to get him to do things such as walk very short distances in the house instead of using a transport chair.

“I had him treated for skin cancers while he was dying of prostate cancer.

“When he started home hospice, the first question I asked the hospice doctor was how to renew services after six months. John died three weeks later.”

What happened? Eda says she missed the signs that John was dying because, for one, he had been active into his late 80s and had been in remission from his first bout of prostate cancer for some two decades when it recurred in 2008. Even as the cancer progressed over the next few years, “he did not look sick,” Eda says. “He didn’t waste away from the cancer.”

Also, crucially, John was diagnosed with severe vascular dementia in 2012. From this point forward, Eda essentially never left his side, spending a total of 50 hours away from John over a four-year period, until he died.

But the signs of his encroaching death from cancer mimicked dementia, she says. “I missed the signs completely, and he had the symptoms — more sleeping, the hallucinations, decreased appetite — except for Hershey’s Kisses. I kept those in a bowl next to his chair all the time.”

The signals got lost in the couple’s intense, repetitive routine, too, Eda noted. “Putting the dentures in his mouth, his hearing aids in, cleaning his wounds.”

Then, John was diagnosed with another cancer, melanoma, in the middle of all this. And, although it clearly “wasn’t going to kill him,” the prostate cancer was, Eda had him treated for melanoma. She also continued to take him to the dentist and such. John never complained about pain, but these visits and treatments, Eda says, “upset him tremendously.”

“I went on as if life was just going on and continued doing stuff like that, that that was not necessary, and that hurt him, it made him feel bad.”

And yes, when hospice showed up at the oncologist’s orders, Eda asked the doctor, “how do we renew in six months?”

The doctor laughed, but Eda weeps at the memory. “I would have done it differently,” she says. “If I’d known he was dying, I wouldn’t have made him walk, I wouldn’t have taken him to the dermatologist….”

Not one of us, her friends, would describe any of what Eda did as a mistake, a mis-judgement, an oversight or anything else. But she suffered from the self-condemnation until, by chance, she found a way to move beyond it.

Early on in her four-year confinement with John, Eda had begun to experience excruciating pain of her own from various spinal ailments. After 12 epidurals over a decade, she reached out for something else, and found meditation, specifically a mindful self-compassion practice.

“I found a book called ‘The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion’ by Chris Germer and it changed my life.”

Self-compassion is “maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Eda says, but she persists with a daily meditation practice (which has also kept her back pain at bay). It includes writing down bedeviling thoughts, venting the idea she hadn’t given John enough attention, for instance. Then writing down the things she did right, “the truth,” which involved her methods of making it through the confinement, for instance. “Yes, I binge-watched Downton Abbey, but I did it sitting next to John in the living room, watching it on my computer, not on TV, because he couldn’t stand to have the TV on.”

Eda also reminds herself of something a hospice nurse told her. A couple of hours before he went into the coma from which he never emerged, even though he’d long had trouble recognizing her, his eyes followed her wherever she moved in the room. “I remind myself that my husband loved me absolutely.”

Another bit of self-talk?

“Eda, you provided him with an endless supply of Hershey’s Kisses. That was the last thing he ate before he died. And he grinned from ear to ear.”

The End.

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