Welcome to Mulligan Island 🏝️
A couple of weeks ago my friend and business partner, Jessica, introduced me to this city planner who plays the game Cities: Skylines on YouTube. For those of you who don’t play a lot of PC games, it’s like Sim City.
You lay down roads, zone lots, and build city infrastructure. The cool thing about Cities: Skylines is that it’s really in-depth.
Like, controlling the supply chains of an oil industry, setting escape routes for a tsunami, and building gazebos in a city park, in-depth.
Anyway, as Phil the city planner builds Verde Beach, he provides ample commentary about real life city planning. He keeps his water pipes under the roads where they belong. He respects road hierarchy to improve connectivity and traffic. But despite all of his city planning knowledge, he still makes mistakes.
Like a ton. He spent several 60-minute episodes trying to fix train problems that were causing death waves. Phil has a phrase when he’s liberally using eminent domain to take out people’s homes and the local donut shop to fix his mistakes. He says: “I’m calling a mulligan.”
This phrase is so popular on his channel that the Verde Beach airport is named the Mulligan International Airport.
I’ve sunk a lot of hours watching Phil play this game. Some of it’s been for rest and entertainment, sometimes it makes me worry about gentrification irl. But I’ve also learned a lot from Phil and his mulligans. Phil has over 100K subscribers. That’s a lot of people to make mulligans in front of — especially when it’s supposed to be your expertise!
I am a recovering perfectionist. Thinking about messing up as much as Phil does in Verde Beach stresses me out. But people love Phil! They ask for his advice about their games and getting into city planning. And that’s got me wondering: what if making mulligans wasn’t the end of the world? What if making mulligans was cool?
In all areas of life we’re reinforced with the idea that mistakes are the end of the world. And in my therapy and coaching journeys there’s a common counter argument that you can’t make a mistake. What we think of as mistakes are learning opportunities, not value judgments or personal failings. And harm becomes an opportunity for reflection, repair, and transformative justice.
While this is something that I’ve always wanted to get behind, it’s friggin hard. Behind the words learning opportunity, I still feel a missed opportunity. And it would be more efficient and easier if I could’ve used that opportunity appropriately the first time.
Because of Phil and his mulligans, I’ve discovered that I don’t want to think of mistakes as net neutral, or a normal thing that everyone does (but we all secretly hate). I want to create a precedent, a culture, a world, where we own our do-overs, make reparations and forgive ourselves. I want mistakes to be net positive.
I hope you can also move to Mulligan Island, the water is warm, the beach is beautiful, and mistakes are cool and good.
