Few things are more frustrating than making mistakes. In addition to whatever circumstances you inflict on yourself as the result of a mistake, there’s the additional dig to your ego. We like to kid ourselves that we’re somehow infallible. That if we focus carefully enough, we can make the right choices every time and enter some blissful alpha state of life.
There is a lot of value in making mistakes. The lessons you learn help you to expand your horizons and prepare for bigger challenges down the road. It’s a necessary component to growth. Most successful business owners have a streak of failed businesses that preceded the good one. Many multi-millionaires have been through bankruptcy. It’s a fact that you have to take risks in order to pull away from the crowd. The law of averages ensures that along with that risk will come failure occasionally. If you dig beneath the superficial, you’ll generally find that the people you admire generally came about those traits through a trial and error process.
The key to growth in your mistakes is this: Never make the same mistake twice.
Making the same mistake twice means you didn’t learn from the experience. You didn’t take a look at what went wrong and correct the problems for the next application. These are the persons that can’t find their way out of debt. That can’t hold relationships together. That spend their lives waiting for some miracle to pluck them out of the mundane and hand them a blissful life on a silver platter. Experience will teach you that these acts of grace rarely happen, and that most people blessed with a windfall tend to waste it away because they hadn’t developed the skills and habits necessary to preserve what they were handed.
When you find yourself in a situation of acknowledging a failure, take some time to review it.
- Why did I fail? What contributed to this undesired outcome?
- What could I have done differently to bring about the outcome I wanted?
- Who/what were the sources of faulty information that I relied on?
- What personality quirks of mine may have contributed to the mistake?
- What kind of safeguards can I put in place to avoid it in the future?
- How can I change my way of thinking to be better prepared the next time opportunity arises?
Someone I know makes an ongoing practice of keeping the mistakes he makes in a little book to periodically review. It’s a bit anal-retentive, but very effective. Before he steps off the deep end into a big decision, he makes it a ritual to re-read the “book of mistakes”, just to ensure he’s thought things through from every angle.
Mistakes aren’t something that many people desire, but they are good. As long as you receive them and learn from them. They’re the most effective educator around.
