You Don't Repeat Mistakes. You Repeat Invisible Processes.
Calling something a "repeated mistake" quietly implies a single, isolated error, happening to recur — as if by bad luck, the same wrong turn keeps getting taken. Look closely at almost any repeated mistake and what's actually repeating isn't the error in isolation. It's an entire process — a sequence of smaller steps, mostly invisible, that reliably arrives at the same wrong turn every time. A Mistake Is the Output. The Process Is What Produces It. The visible mistake is the last step of something longer — a chain of smaller perceptions, interpretations, and reactions that, run in sequence, land on the same outcome. Calling the outcome the mistake, and trying to fix the outcome directly, addresses the last link in a chain while leaving every link before it completely intact. The chain, still functional, simply produces the same last link again next time. Why "Just Don't Make That Mistake Again" Doesn't Work This advice targets the output, and the output was never where the actual causation lived. It's a bit like trying to change where a river ends up by moving a rock at the very end of its course — the water, following the same channel from much further upstream, finds its way back to roughly the same place regardless. The process upstream of the visible mistake is what determines the outcome, and it stays completely untouched by resolutions aimed only at the outcome itself. What the Invisible Process Actually Consists Of A specific way of interpreting a certain kind of moment. A specific emotional response that gets triggered by that interpretation. A specific default action that follows from the response. None of these steps look like "the mistake" individually — each one looks like an ordinary, almost neutral moment. It's only in sequence, run together, that they reliably terminate in the outcome that finally gets labeled a mistake. Why This Reframing Actually Matters "I keep making the same mistake" invites shame and a vague resolve to somehow be more careful. "I keep running the same process" invites something more specific and more useful: curiosity about which step in the sequence is actually doing the work, and whether it can be interrupted before it reaches its usual conclusion. The second framing offers an actual point of entry. The first mostly offers self-criticism aimed at a moment that was already too late to intervene in. Where the Real Leverage Is Not at the point where the mistake becomes visible, but several steps earlier, in the part of the process that runs quietly enough to never get called a mistake at all — the interpretation, the trigger, the default that sets everything else in motion.
Meet Ori — built to trace the invisible process back from the visible mistake, to the step where it actually could have gone differently.
Part of The Recognition Library →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai