Learning from our mistakes

Do you find yourself making mistakes over and over again? Well, you are not alone. Many have made it a point in life never to make mistakes. But they forget that mistakes are inevitable in life; they are bound to happen one way or the other and no matter what. Learning to live with mistakes will do a lot of good if we are taking the lessons therein.

This is probably why former United States of America President Bill Clinton once said, “If you live long enough, you’ll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you’ll be a better person.” Also in her book, writer Jane Brian says “There is a lesson in every mistake. That is why we must learn from every mistake we make. Making mistakes is the way we were all designed to learn. If we fail to make mistakes, or make them and do not learn from them, then the whole essence is defeated. Whenever we make a mistake, we often become upset. And being upset is God’s way of telling us that we need to learn something. It is a tap on our shoulder saying, ‘Pay attention. You have something important to learn.’ If we lie, blame, justify, or deny the upset, we will waste the precious gem of wisdom that is in every mistake.”

On the other hand, the unwillingness to face the fact that you are not perfect, that you have made and will continue to make mistakes, is a major source of stress. The second common approach that people take with regard to their mistakes and also one that hurts innumerable lives and careers is the failure to use the mistakes mistake we make to better ourselves and to improve the quality of our thinking.

“I used to think that as I matured I would make fewer mistakes. I thought, I’m going to get better at this, because I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. I believed that there would come a day when I wouldn’t make very many mistakes, because I would be better. What I learned, however, was that as I matured I would continue to make mistakes, but I would learn more quickly from them. Maturity helps us become better people because it helps us learn from our mistakes” says Ms. Aisha Momoh, a resident of Abuja.

Learning from your mistakes is an essential skill that enables you to develop the resilience to be a master of change rather than a victim of change. The person who recognizes that they have made a mistake and changes direction the fastest is the one who will win in an all spheres of life. By remaining fast you will become a creator of circumstances rather than a creature of circumstances.

Mistakes and problems are good. Without them there would be no opportunities for greatness. When you take every challenge that life throws at you, accepting it as an inevitable part of the growing experience, you can turn it to your advantage in every way possible. Almost every mistake you make contains a hidden treasure that you can apply to your life to forge ahead.

The question isn’t “How many mistakes have you made?” but “How many of the same mistakes have you made?” One secret to success is to not repeat the same mistakes. Dr. Joyce Brothers says: “The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.” No matter what you do, no matter how careful you are, mistakes will be made. You also don’t want to fall into the trap of letting fear of making a mistake trap you in a world where you are not willing to take any risks. To do this is to miss out on so much potential.

After a while you learn to risk because you know the mistakes are unavoidable. You can’t get around them, and in fact, with the proper perspective, you don’t want to. You embrace mistakes as a way of learning. You don’t try to fail, but accept that you will sometimes.

Roosevelt reminded us that: “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.” Successful people usually have a string of failures and mistakes in their past that they used as a platform to further success.”

Life is a continuous succession of problems and mistakes. But it is not what happens to you, but how you react to what happens to you that make all the difference in your life. You have within you, the ability to learn from every mistake, to extract every valuable lesson that is contained in every difficult situation, or challenge that you face. You have the intelligence to turn every stumbling block into a stepping stone, or springboard toward higher achievement.

As Henry Ford put it, “Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.”