Chances are you're still stewing over some mistake in your past, Axios' Hans Nichols writes.

• Why it matters: The new book "From Mistakes to Meaning" offers a framework for processing your missteps, large or small, and letting them go.

📘 Co-authors Michael Lynton and Joshua Steiner have laid bare their own highly public missteps, and interviewed others about theirs.

Zoom in: For Lynton, the former head of Sony Pictures Entertainment, his big mistake was green-lighting "The Interview," a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco about a plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un.

💻 What followed was anything but comedic.

• Instead, Sony was hit by a cyberattack attributed to North Korea, one of the most destructive corporate hacks at the time.
• Executives' private emails spilled into public view, along with other sensitive company data.
• Racial jokes surfaced. Reputations were damaged.

As Lynton recounts, President Obama asked him:
"What were you thinking when you made killing the leader of a hostile foreign nation a plot point?" Ouch.

📓 Steiner's mistake centers on a diary he kept during the Clinton administration-era Whitewater affair, when he was a young Treasury official.

• The diary was subpoenaed, made public — and became the talk of Washington.

If that doesn't sound so bad, read Maureen Dowd's acidic piece about it.

• Imagine yourself as a bright-eyed 28-year-old Yale graduate testifying before Congress. Then facing your friends and mentors afterward.
• Disclosure: Josh is a friend and I have known about his diary for years, but never dreamed of asking him about it.

Between the lines: Your biggest mistakes are often set in motion long before the offending act. Lynton and Steiner call this your "schema" — the deeper pattern driving your choices.

• For Lynton, it was a desire to belong, to seem cool around Rogen and Franco.
"My middle school self took over," he writes.

At its core, this is a self-help book. And Lynton and Steiner have a handy acronym to confront — and conquer — your mistakes: DUET.

1. 🗣️ Disclose: Find a trusted friend and talk it through. Start small — not with your biggest blunder.
2. 🎒 Unpack: Examine what led to the mistake, both the immediate trigger and the longer-term patterns behind it. Identify how you felt afterward. Understand the schema.
3. ❤️‍🩹 Empathize: Don't be too hard on yourself. Extend that same grace when others share their mistake(s).
4. 🤝 Trust: In yourself — and the person you're confiding in.

The bottom line: Confront your mistakes, however embarrassing. The people closest to you know they don't define you.

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Finish Liner Robert Fahey snapped this photo looking east out over the beach in Jupiter, Fla.