Mastering Your Mistakes

Motivation and drive are all great, but it’s important to remember that mistakes will be made on the way. This is something everyone experiences and dreads at the same time. Some learn from their mistakes, never letting them come in the way of their motivation, while other get de-railed.

Everyone fears mistakes and the main reason is judgement. Everyone fears being judged by those superior to them and near them.

The truth is, it’s okay to be judged on the one condition that you believe in yourself. You made a mistake and you can attain for it, accept it and admit to it. Your decisions are yours to make and make you who you are.

If you don’t make your own decisions, you’ll never truly be your own person. Other people can manipulate, encourage and influence you but it’s the decision you take afterwards that makes you an individual.

If this seems too inspiring, think of baby steps. If an infant were never to fall over while trying to walk, it would never develop the fear of falling or the love of standing properly without collapsing.

Collapsing shows them what happens if you walk without balance, and they seek to conquer that in order to walk like everyone else does. No matter what age you are, motivation drives us to grow and mistakes are the stepping stones to success along the road.

Change in Every Step

With every choice you make, there’s going to be change and change can bring along mistakes. Just as well, mistakes can bring along change. To clear it up, a great example would be walking down a new path. Rather than going down the same path every day, you take a new one.

First comes the power of motivation. After going down the same path every day, it does get a little boring. Now you’ve figured out that a different path leads to your same destination and you have access to it. It may be longer, it may be shorter. It’s up to you to find out.

This act of motivation to discover is going to bring along change. You’ll see new things while you walk, you’ll see the environment, familiarize with it and see new faces along the way. You may even make mistakes while you do.

Any simple innocent mistake like tripping on a crack you didn’t know was there. Locals to the neighbourhood may not make this mistake because they knew, but you didn’t and so came to be your blunder. This is what change can offer.

Change brings with it experience, knowledge, and development if you can surpass all the inevitable mistakes. Mistakes are nothing to be ashamed of, and change should never be feared.

One thing people can’t seem to shake is that change is like a back alley in the dead of night, you don’t know what awaits in the end.

This can definitely make change seem intimidating. There are larger cases than walking down a new road, like walking down a new world in a different country. It’s a completely different group of people around you, with different expectations, different surroundings and different mentalities. You definitely don’t want to trip over any cracks here. But you may, and who said anything about it?

Now you know. You have familiarized yourself with change, a new place and people and they’re not new anymore. You know more and understand more by walking down the back alley and suddenly, it isn’t so dark.

How Mistakes can Help You

Mistakes can bring along change in you in a positive manner only if you have an empowering belief around the word ‘mistakes’ or ‘failures’. Mistakes are not here to punish you, but to teach you that there is always a better way. They are a continuous cycle that helps you make progress to improving yourself.

Going back to your walk, when you walked down that new path and stumbled over the crack, you learnt something. Now you know that there is a crack in the sidewalk and the next round, you’ll watch out for it. This mistake taught you something and next time, you won’t make that mistake.

Learning from the mistake so that you won’t do it again brought change. This change is going to help you in not making the same mistake so you can keep going down that road. You may even start paying more attention to the road from this time forward, which is another change brought forth by the mistake you made.

Had you not gone that road, you would’ve never stumbled and learnt that there are crevices down the sidewalk, meaning you never developed the awareness of it. Tripping over a crack is such an insignificant thing to do, but there’s a lot behind the action that occurs afterwards. That’s why you can never overlook your mistakes. They are lessons in disguise.

But the real question is, what started this adventure down a dented sidewalk? The little rush of motivation you got to walk down the new road is what made this possible. Without motivation to do things, we are nothing. Without the mistakes we make, we will never learn.

An inventor makes a faulty machine that doesn’t work. A businessman makes a sales choice that doesn’t sell. A mother decides to make a new dish that doesn’t turn out to be five stars. All of these actions turned out to be less than perfect.

But that still means the inventor felt motivated to make the machine, the businessman felt motivated to make new sales and the mother wanted to try new recipes. Now they all know better due to their mistakes and make a choice based on it.

Will they accept defeat and never try again, or learn from the mistake and try once more to do something new and creative. Evolution is based off of mistakes, and mistakes should never be what de-motivates you.

No Pain No Gain

Mistakes mean you take the fall. If you do something wrong, accidentally or on purpose for the sake of curiosity, you’ve made a mistake. Now it’s up to you to learn from it or avoid it. A mistake must be admitted before you can ever learn something from it.

It’s not a mistake to do something on purpose with the means of inflicting harm. That’s plainly being rebellious and crude. A mistake means no harm, and is something to learn from.

If an inventor never made a mistake because they feared the idea of it, how would they ever learn to move ahead from the mistake? Fear is a natural reaction to most things that involve new aspects in life. Mistakes open new possibilities, new doors and sharpen who you are, which some people don’t want.

Taking the initiative to make a change and understand that mistakes will be made along the way is one part of the whole story. The next part is admitting to that mistake. It can be embarrassing, it can be terrifying. These feelings come from your stilted influence from others around you.

The only thing you need to know is that the only opinion that matters, is yours. This is your mistake and no one can take it back. Hearing words from others can only help you so much. It’s what you do to yourself that matters in the end.

Welling up around the mistake and letting it taunt you isn’t a profitable way to take things. Admitting, accepting and learning from it are the real actions you’ll benefit from. Once you let in the mistake, you can gain from it. What did you learn and how can you overcome making that mistake again? The saying is true, without any pain there will never be anything to gain.