Mistakes are the price of being awake

The line comes from The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, a short text Ingvar Kamprad wrote for IKEA’s staff in 1976. It is widely quoted in a smoother form, that only those who are asleep make no mistakes; the translation IKEA has used reads as above, and the meaning is the same. In the same passage Kamprad calls making mistakes the privilege of active people who can correct them, and he blames the fear of error for the growth of bureaucracy.

IKEA’s own history offers a good example. When the company opened its first stores in the United States in the mid-1980s, it sold what worked in Europe. Beds came in European sizes that did not fit American sheets. Drinking glasses were so small that customers reportedly bought them as vases. Kitchen cabinets did not match American appliances. The stores struggled until IKEA changed the range to suit the market. The mistakes were expensive, but they were visible and fixable, and a company too afraid to open in America would never have learned any of it.

Kamprad’s target was organizational. Large companies tend to add approval steps each time something goes wrong, until nobody can act without a signature. Each rule prevents a mistake that already happened and makes the next useful decision slower. Treating errors as normal lets people act without waiting for permission.

The argument assumes the mistake can be put right. Many cannot. A safety failure, a broken promise to a customer or a bet that consumes the whole company offers no second attempt. Kamprad himself carried one mistake he could not undo: his involvement as a young man with a Swedish pro-Nazi movement, which he later described as the greatest error of his life. Correction was not available; only an apology was.

The practical version is to sort decisions by whether they can be reversed. Where they can, act quickly and accept that some will be wrong. Where they cannot, slow down, because being awake includes knowing which mistakes are survivable.