Arjun Singh Rathore
John Lennon in his song Beautiful Boy has wisely observed that “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”. I’ve always loved this line and how astute this observation is. You can set all the goals you want for the future, but that won’t change the fact that your life has to be lived moment to moment and day to day.
The desire to be a better person today more so than yesterday should intensify throughout life. It should be instinctual to improve, for most of us, at least. That urge we get to do better each day propels us and keeps moving us forward. It makes us want to get up the next day and take steps toward each goal, so that we can prove to ourselves that it is possible to do bigger and better.
We all have specific dreams, hopes and desires. Working to achieve these helps us exercise our muscles and get stronger. Even if we are just showing ourselves how much better we can do, reflecting on the mistakes from yesterday helps us to put a plan of action in place to help us focus and reach our goals along this journey.
Reaching our goals equates to a better tomorrow. When we do not reach our expectations on day one, it does not mean that we have permanently failed. We must learn to Reset our yesterdays and improve our lives for tomorrow. We should not let small Slip-ups make us give up on the promise of having a great future. Life is just like a game of cards, when you make a mistake in one game, you shuffle the deck again and start all over. It is important to not let a temporary defeat affect you permanently. If we never make mistakes, then how will we learn? Learning from the small errors we made yesterday is a necessity in order to be better tomorrow.
The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible. And those who do it well, are extraordinarily rare. Failure and fault are virtually inseparable in most households, organizations, and cultures. Every child must be brought up in such a manner to learn at some point that admitting failure means not taking the blame but the desire to improve and perform more strongly.
Intelligent failures at the frontier are rightly considered good, because they provide valuable new knowledge that can help to leap ahead of the competition and ensure future growth. They occur when experimentation is necessary: when answers are not knowable in advance because this exact situation hasn’t been encountered before and perhaps never will be again.
Parents, teachers, friends, colleagues and even leaders can create and reinforce a culture in the society, that counteracts the blame game and makes people feel both comfortable with and responsible for surfacing and learning from failures. They teach and develop a clear understanding of what happened, not of “who did it” when things go wrong. This requires consistently reporting and discussing failures, small and big; systematically analyzing them; and proactively searching for opportunities to experiment and improve for future. Because we are in discovery business, and the faster we fail, the faster we will learn to succeed.
Making mistakes is a guarantee in life. You can’t avoid them entirely, no matter what you do. What matters more than any blunder or its magnitude is your response afterward. Most, if not all, of our mistakes, can be excellent learning opportunities. So, rather than perceiving mistakes inversely proportional to opportunities, we ought to make them directly proportional to learning outcomes; capitalize on them, turn them into learning experiences and eventually improve outcomes and produce excellent results. Having said this, I must emphasize that no words could have better put and explained it than “Fail faster, succeed sooner”, the inspiring axiom attributed to David Kelley, renowned expert on innovation design.
A mistake is normally an error in judgment, misunderstanding, or misguided action. You won’t always have poor intentions when making mistakes, in fact, many mistakes are accidents. They can occur because you simply didn’t know better, whether in your personal or professional life. Alternatively, failure usually comes from a lack of success, or an inability to meet expectations. Several consecutive mistakes could lead to failure, but the terms aren’t synonymous. Fear of failure is natural. But since humans aren’t perfect, errors are inevitable, and both mistakes and failure are great learning experiences.
Self-reflection is difficult but crucial to the learning journey. Similar to ownership, you can’t take steps to change things if you don’t know what you did. Ask yourself the hard questions, Take the time to consider what led up to the mistake, including errors you made along the way.
Change is perhaps one of the only constant things about our world. Everything around us, technology, our careers, where we live, whom we love, and what we value, is constantly shifting. Change leads to unfamiliar territory, and with unfamiliar territory comes mistakes. It is impossible to anticipate everything that will happen; all we can do is try our best, ask for help, and support others. Rest assured, you aren’t alone in whatever it is you are dealing with.
The quote of Walt Disney “Ah yes, the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it” will always be inspirational and guaranteed to put a smile on the face and give a spark one needs, who at any given point of time in their life might be feeling down.
When both of my children were toddlers, I occasionally spilled milk and food items and also sometimes pencil shavings from sharpener and eraser/rubber dust in front of them during meal and study times. “Oops, oh well, no big deal, let’s clean it up!!” I would say in my high-pitched, goofy voice.
Before they could speak, I sensed that they were wired for perfectionism (something very familiar to me), so I attempted to normalize day-to-day mistakes and to show them how easy it was to bounce back from them.
We all as kids as well as elders are in the thick of the spilled-milk journey, learning to accept and embrace mistakes on a larger scale. Now both my kids are grownup adults, and I am all the more sensitized to how they respond to mistakes in their lives in particular and how they enhance or detract from their learnings.
If teachers and parents can help their students and children, focus on skills and strategies that enhance resilience, they will learn to cope better, recover more quickly, or at least start heading in that direction. There are always good reasons to rethink our approach to mistakes so that we can help our children to ultimately benefit, both academically and emotionally. It’s okay to mess up and spill the milk. There is even beauty in vulnerability for it gives us space to find our strength.
Yeh subah hamin se ayegi, Uss subah ko hum hi layenge, Woh subah hamin sey ayegi.
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