If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning. - Catherine Aird, British crime fiction writer.

When I first started making videos, if I made even the smallest mistake, I would immediately stop, delete what I just recorded, and start over. I wanted everything to be polished and perfect. But over time, I realized that leaving mistakes in was actually more valuable. As I started keeping them in, I got feedback from people saying they appreciated it because they learned from seeing those mistakes happen in real time. That has always been my philosophy. Learning from mistakes is one of the best ways to truly understand something.

If I make an actual mistake while recording, chances are a student watching will make the same mistake at some point. It is probably something I have done a dozen times myself, maybe even forgotten about until it happens again. Rather than editing it out, I leave it in so you can see what went wrong and, more importantly, how to fix it.

But sometimes, I take it a step further. There are certain mistakes that I know most people make, including myself at some point. In those cases, I will intentionally put that mistake in the video so I can demonstrate the error, explain why it happens, and show how to correct it. I have always found that I learn best from making mistakes and then fixing them (both in software development and in life), so I try to include them in my lessons whenever possible.

Most of the time, the mistakes you see in my videos were actual mistakes I made years ago when I was first learning this stuff. If I stumbled on it, I figured you probably would too. So instead of just giving you the perfect, polished version, I show the roadblocks, the frustrations, and how to work through them. Because at the end of the day, that is how real learning happens.

Learning from one's mistakes is important... like in that episode from The Next Generation called Cause and Effect (one of my favorites), where the Enterprise gets stuck in a time loop, repeating the same disaster over and over. Each time the ship is destroyed, the crew's memories reset, but they start to get a sense of deja vu. Data eventually realizes he made a mistake in interpreting a clue from Riker in the previous loops. Learning from that error, he makes a different choice, which finally breaks the loop and saves the ship. It's a great example of a character recognizing past mistakes and using that knowledge to solve the problem.

How about you? Do you find it helpful to see mistakes and how to fix them, or do you prefer a cleaner, edited approach?