The difference between winners and everyone else isn’t avoiding mistakes, it’s keeping them so small they barely register.
Earlier today I was tuned into David Senra’s interview with Michael Dell. Dell dropped a line every trader and builder should learn to accept and embrace:
“Go make mistakes nobody’s ever made before, but try to make them in small increments, and fix your mistakes as fast as you find them.”
That single quote? It’s a filter for every strategy, system, or business worth running.
Because progress isn’t about perfection, it’s about keeping the damage trivial and fixing errors fast.
Applying this mindset:
Experiment, but throttle the risk. Want to launch a product, test a portfolio, pitch a wild theory? Fine, but cap the exposure. Protect your core capital and let mistakes stay small.
Apply this everywhere:
In trading, it’s a stop-loss.
In business, it’s iterating fast and dumping what doesn’t stick.
In relationships, own your errors before it snowballs.
But, here’s a very important distinction:
The game isn’t “no mistakes” - it’s “no massive mistakes.”
As a trader this means: Booking partial profits when trades go in your favor, relentlessly managing risk, and swinging hard in favorable conditions… knowing every position could be wrong, but none will sink the ship.
Michael Dell nailed it: you actually want errors, you learn, iterate, and evolve by screwing up.
Just shrink the cost, move quickly, and keep playing for the next round.
That’s the real edge.