My youngest broke his ankle playing football this past fall. On a sweep around the left end of his offensive line, he was hit from a couple of different angles that twisted his leg and then was tackled by a low hit on his leg. Too much twisting and the impact of the last hit caused a fracture in the bone. Of course we ended up in the radiology unit of the local hospital for an x-ray of the damaged leg. It is interesting that whenever there is a question about damaged bones, we expect to have an x-ray taken to confirm or deny a break.

It is funny that the x-ray came about as a mistake. Wilhelm Rontgen was a professor of physics in Würzburg, Germany. On November 8, 1895, Rontgen was testing a cathode ray to see the impact it would have as it passed through glass. He accidentally pointed a beam of electromagnetic energy onto a chemically coated cardboard screen and noticed that it glowed when the lights were out. Rontgen then began to experiment with x-rays in his lab. He made an x-ray of his wife’s hand, finding that the electromagnetic beams could pass through flesh, but did not penetrate bones. Rontgen’s experiments with the photography of bones opened up a revolution in medicine, creating a new field of practice in radiology that is central to proper diagnosis today. Without his accident, we might not have a host of imagining technology that make diagnosing medical conditions possible. Rontgen was awarded the first Nobel Prize for physics in 1901 for his discovery.

What have you discovered from your mistakes? Obviously not every mistake opens a new industry, but there are plenty of examples where a seemingly wrong turn has turned into best practices down the road. Do you look at mistakes as the worst thing that can possibly happen to you or are they opportunities for growth? There are no perfect people and there are no perfect businesses – which are just groupings of imperfect people. Your business is going to misfire every now and then. Goals are going to go unmet. Best intentions will go wrong. It just happens. What do you do with the failed attempts? Do you grit your teeth and vow to never let it happen again? Do you ignore the issue like it never really happened in the first place? Do you scheme up some incredible spinning story to try to convince everyone that the mistake was actually not what it seemed to be? Or do you just blame someone else for their shortcomings in an attempt to try to distract attention away from you? In a society that has anesthetized itself against feeling any pain, let me say something that may sound odd. There is purpose in pain. There is good to be had in making mistakes – especially painful mistakes. We don’t learn a thing without them. If we don’t learn, we never grow. You could say that pain is the impetus behind growth. So how do you handle miscues in your business? At the very least, we should all own up to our mistakes and evaluate what went wrong, if for no other reason than to keep from making the same mistakes again and again.

But you should also look for the opportunity in your mistakes. Are they missteps or just the first step to the next big thing? Like the x-ray, Penicillin was the result of Alexander Fleming’s sloppiness. When he left dirty Petri dishes out in his lab, they began to grow bacteria. As he was cleaning up the mess, he discovered that one dish also had mold growing in it and the bacteria had been stopped from infiltrating that part of the dish. A 3M engineer was trying to make a super strong adhesive when he invented just the opposite: a weak adhesive that could be used over and over again. His mistake became the Post-it Note. Plastics were discovered by mistake. So was vulcanized rubber. Just the other day, I wrote a note to myself on a sticky note, reminding me to go to the pharmacy on my way home from work to pick up an antibiotic for our sick dog. I drove my car to the pharmacy, had the prescription filled and took the pill bottle home with me. Did you follow my list of mistakes-turned-to-opportunity inventions that I used? I wrote a note on a Post-it, I drove my car which rolls on tires made of vulcanized rubber, picked up an antibiotic made of penicillin, which was contained in a plastic bottle. Those are just four examples of mistakes that have changed the way we live.

Don’t miss the opportunities that mistakes afford you. They can help you grow. They may help you grow your company.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1901, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, Nobelprize.org